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The most successful tyranny is not the one
that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the
awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable
that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an
outside.
Allan Bloom The Closing of the American
Mind

"This country, with its institutions,
belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow
weary of the existing government, they can exercise their
constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right
to dismember or overthrow it." - Abraham Lincoln, First
Inaugural

It is dangerous to be right
in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.
--Voltaire--

Faith of
consciousness is freedom
Faith of feeling is weakness
Faith of body is stupidity.
Love of consciousness evokes the same in response
Love of feeling evokes the opposite
Love of the body depends only on type and polarity.
Hope of consciousness is strength
Hope of feeling is slavery
Hope of body is disease. [Gurdjieff]

Life is religion.
Life experiences reflect how one interacts with God. Those who are
asleep are those of little faith in terms of their interaction with
the creation. Some people think that the world exists for them to
overcome or ignore or shut out. For those individuals, the worlds
will cease. They will become exactly what they give to life. They
will become merely a dream in the "past." People who pay strict
attention to objective reality right and left, become the reality
of the "Future." [Cassiopaea
09-28-02]

March 28,
2003Today's edition ofBrought to You by
The Bush Junta, Produced and Directed by the CIA, based on an
original script by Henry Kissinger, with a cast of billions....The
"Greatest Shew on Earth," no doubt, and if you don't have a good
sense of humor, don't read this page! It is designed to reveal the
"unseen." If you can't stand the heat of Objective Reality, get out
of the kitchen!

'Many dead' in Baghdad
attackThe blast hit a residential
area, reports say At least 50 civilians are believed to have been
killed during an air raid on a Baghdad market, Iraqi authorities
say. Graphic television pictures showed people scrabbling through
rubble to reach the dead and injured amid the wreckage in the Shula
residential area of the city. Reports of the attack came as
coalition forces renewed night-time bombing across the Iraqi
capital. On the ground, US-led forces were fighting for control of
invasion routes in northern, central and southern Iraq. Separately,
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused Syria of allowing the
trafficking of military equipment across its border to Iraq and
said it would be held accountable for what the US viewed as a
hostile act. He also warned Iran - which organised anti-war rallies
on Friday - against putting any personnel into Iraq, saying they
would be considered combatants.

Correspondents in Baghdad
say there is no clear information yet on what may have caused the
destruction of the market. Dr Osama Sakhari at Baghdad's al-Noor
Hospital told Reuters news agency he had counted 55 people killed
and more than 47 wounded from Friday's attack. Arabic broadcasters
in Qatar and Abu Dhabi each said more than 50 people were dead. Abu
Dhabi television said the devastation may have been caused by a US
cruise missile. But US officials at the Central Command
headquarters in Qatar told the BBC they had no details yet and
suggested it may have been a misfired Iraqi missile. Comment: These "US officials" are the lowest of the low.
They massacre innocent civilians going about their daily chores,
and then immediately blame the Iraqis themselves. As for Rumsfeld's
comment about Syria and Iran, well, what can I say, they are
pathetically predictable.

The Myth of
OmnipotenceI have long held the belief
that the American people are not stupid, though they are decidedly
ignorant. By that, I mean that the fact that Americans' collective
view of the world is not grounded in any sort of objective reality
is due not to the fact that Americans have no capacity for critical
thought, but rather to the fact that we are deliberately deprived
of the information that we need to form a coherent world
view.

I must say, however, that
it is getting increasingly hard to cling to that belief. After
immersing myself for several days in the world of cable 'news' - an
activity that I usually avoid at all costs - I have come to the
conclusion that anyone who can watch this parade of fools and not
know that they are being lied to has to be a few Freedom Fries
short of a Happy Meal. A pattern to the coverage of the Iraq war is
ridiculously easy to discern: first, a recklessly transparent lie
is told; then, it is repeated endlessly by a stable of resident
'experts,' apparently in an attempt to bolster its credibility;
this continues until the initial claim is irrefutably revealed as a
lie; at which time another layer of spin and lies is added, with no
acknowledgment that the initial claim was entirely fraudulent; with
the new lies in place, the process begins again.

The certainty with which
these breathtakingly brazen lies are told is truly something to
behold, particularly on Fox News, where it is gleefully reported
that Saddam is dead even as he continues to make regular
appearances on Iraqi television. Fox has assured us in the last few
days that there is no resistance in Iraq; that victory is just
days, if not hours, away; that the entire country would be under
U.S. control by Sunday, March 23; that Tariq Aziz has defected;
that Tariq Aziz is dead; that Iraqi command and control has
completely broken down; that entire divisions of the Iraqi military
have already surrendered; that negotiations are underway for the
surrender of the Republican Guard; that 20% of Republican Guard
forces have already surrendered; that Umm Qasr is under U.S.
control; that the Faw Peninsula is under coalition control; that
Basra is under U.S. control; that al Nasiriyah is under U.S.
control; that virtually all of southern Iraq is under U.S. control;
that the biggest problem U.S. troops are facing is how to deal
logistically with mass surrenders and thousands of POWs; that there
have been no POWs taken by the Iraqis, that no aircraft have been
shot down or captured; that no American tanks have been destroyed;
and that no casualties have been inflicted by Iraqi
forces.

And those are just some of
the more outrageous claims that have been revealed as lies.
Virtually every thing that is said is a lie. And they're not even
good lies. They're not even credible lies. They are absolutely
shameless lies. Tall tales are told of the pinpoint precision and
flawless performance of Tomahawk cruise missiles even while a brief
blurb on the constantly running news ticker reveals that quite a
few of them don't even hit the right country. The U.S. military is
discussed with awestruck reverence, its technological superiority
said to render it omnipotent, just after an Iraqi videotape reveals
that an Apache Longbow helicopter, one of the most heavily armed
and technologically advanced weapons in the U.S. arsenal, has been
taken out by a group of villagers and farmers armed with
rifles.

The Iraqi regime is loudly
denounced for violating the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of
prisoners of war after doing nothing more diabolical than airing
brief video clips of the questioning of American POWs (which was
done to expose the lies put out by Washington and the U.S. media),
and that denunciation comes from a regime that has openly advocated
using torture on 'terrorist' suspects, that has reportedly beaten
Afghan prisoners to death at a special
'interrogation' center and that has used a 'terrorist'
suspect's young children as
leverage to extract information.

George Bush stands on the
White House lawn and sternly cautions the Iraqis to treat American
POWs fairly and humanely, in the same way that the U.S. has treated
the prisoners that it holds humanely. Is this advice intended to be
taken literally? Should we expect to soon be seeing videotape of
American POWs being stripped, bound, blindfolded, tossed into
'tiger cages' and left exposed to the elements? Is that what Bush
has in mind?

It has taken less than a
week of warfare for the administration's justifications for waging
it to be exposed as lies. No alleged 'weapons of mass destruction,'
and no 'banned' weapons have been deployed by Iraqi forces. Not so
much as a Scud missile, it is now being admitted. And no caches of
banned weapons have been found, despite advance billing. After
flogging a blatantly fraudulent story of the discovery of a huge
chemical weapons plant for a couple of days, the cable networks
have fallen silent on the issue of quickly seizing bio/chem weapon
stashes. As for the claims of seeking to liberate the Iraqi people,
it is abundantly clear that the Iraqi people are violently opposed
to American-style 'liberation,' though that doesn't stop the Fox
folks from continuing to prominently display an "Operation Iraqi
Freedom" graphic.

'News' coverage of this war
is heavily reliant on Pentagon-provided euphemisms. Most of them
are fairly transparent. "Pockets of resistance," for instance, as
in "coalition forces have met pockets of resistance," refers to
U.S. troops meeting with fierce, organized resistance and taking
casualties. "Mechanical failure," as in "a coalition aircraft made
a forced landing due to mechanical failure," means that a U.S.
aircraft has been shot down by Iraqi forces. "Hard landing" means
much the same thing. "Coalition," by the way, refers to an invading
army composed of approximately 85% Americans, 15% Brits, and a
couple of guys from Australia.

The phrase, "Iraqi troops
dressed in civilian clothes," refers to either (1) civilians
paraded before the cameras and claimed to be captured Iraqi POWs,
or (2) civilians that have willingly taken up arms to assist the
Iraqi military in repelling the U.S. invasion. And "Iraqi troops
feigning surrender and attacking U.S. troops" refers to Iraqi
troops outmaneuvering U.S. troops and inflicting casualties.
Finding anything resembling the truth through the dense fog of lies
is not an easy task. But one thing seems pretty clear: the Beast has
been wounded. And that is a rather scary thing, because one of
the Beast's worst fears is of being perceived as being weak. If
threatened with exposure of the fact that it is not omnipotent, it
will act out in increasingly violent and unpredictable
ways.

As near as can be
determined, the Beast's Great War Plan lies in ruins. That is
evident in the increasingly panicked tone of the 'news' coverage,
and in the constant flow of statements from officials and analysts
reassuring the American people that everything is proceeding
smoothly, when that is clearly not the case. When a command and
control center gets fragged almost before the first shots are
fired, that's a pretty good sign that there might be some problems.
The U.S. appears to be pretty much winging it at this point. As one
ABC military analyst (who apparently didn't understand his role,
much to the dismay of Peter Jennings) surmised early on, the Iraqis
appear to have taken the strategic initiative from the start of the
war. The result of this is that the U.S. has been forced into a
reactive mode.

The military component of
this operation has been scrapped primarily because, U.S. arrogance
being what it is, no one bothered to factor in such elements as an
actual opposing army. Meanwhile, the psychological warfare
component, being conducted largely by the allegedly 'free' American
press, is laughably inept and completely ineffective in obtaining
Washington's objectives.The current situation is that, having
quickly come to the realization that none of their targets in the
south can be taken without sustained and bloody battles, the U.S.
war machine is apparently staking it all now on a battle for
Baghdad, in a reckless bid to save face and in the desperate hope
that the fall of Baghdad will result in the surrender of the rest
of the country.

As all the analysts
explained initially, it is absolutely essential that an advancing
army 'secure the rear.' It is a basic rule of warfare that you
don't leave yourself vulnerable to attack from the rear by leaving
hostile forces in your wake. You don't take the chance that you
will find yourself cut off from supply and support, surrounded by
enemy forces. That is why the analysts all assured everyone that
all the cities in the south would be quickly secured before the
march on Baghdad. But now, having revealed that the fall of Baghdad
has purportedly always been our top priority, all of that becomes
insignificant and the analysts all now marvel at the "amazing
flexibility" and "boldness" of U.S. military planners. In truth,
what those masters of war are doing is sending tens of thousands of
young, unsuspecting American kids into a situation where they could
very well find themselves cut off, surrounded, and pummeled by
Iraqi forces.

Even without the problems
presented by an unsecured rear, U.S. forces have virtually no
chance of taking Baghdad by conventional means.

The border town of Umm Qasr
has been hammered for five days, bearing the full weight of the
U.S. war machine. It has been subjected to unrelenting aerial
bombardment, massive artillery shelling, heavy tank fire, and
everything else 'coalition' forces can think to throw at it. And
yet resistance remains. Umm Qasr, it should be noted, is a town of
just 4,000 residents. It lies within sight of U.S. military
encampments in Kuwait. It is in the Shiite south, which was
supposed to offer little or no resistance to U.S. occupation. And
it is being defended, according to a March 23 report in Financial
Times, by a force of just "120 Iraqi soldiers still fighting
against overwhelming odds."

Baghdad, on the other hand,
is a sprawling city of some 5,000,000 residents. It lies several
hundred miles from U.S. base camps, in central Iraq, where the
Hussein regime enjoys its highest levels of support. And it is
defended by tens of thousands of elite troops, supplemented with
tens of thousands of regular army forces, and probably as many as a
million armed citizens. And that number is growing day by day;
instead of a massive flow of refugees out of the country, there has
been, and continues to be, a steady flow of Iraqis and others
entering the country to assist in the defense of Baghdad and other
Iraqi cities. For a preview of the battle for Baghdad, take the
siege of Umm Qasr and multiply by a factor of at least a thousand.
But surely, you say, our vastly superior forces can easily defeat
the Iraqis. Our troops are better trained, better equipped, and
have much higher morale. Everyone knows that.

But I beg to differ. It is
very unlikely that our troops are better trained. I doubt very much
that some reservist snatched off the streets of Southern California
knows any more about waging tank warfare in a desert sandstorm than
I do. It seems very unlikely that our troops are better trained
than troops that were born, raised and trained in the environment
that they are now fighting in. And what do U.S. military planners,
despite all their bluster and arrogance, know about waging
mechanized warfare? When was the last time that the U.S. war
machine was engaged in a war that was primarily reliant on
mechanized ground forces? The last time I checked, it was during
WWII, six decades ago. This war then is something of a test for
U.S. military strategists. Iraqi generals, on the other hand, are
intimately familiar with the concept of mechanized desert
warfare.

The notion that U.S. troops
have higher morale and are more motivated to fight seems rather
unlikely as well. The American men and women deployed over there
have no personal stake in the outcome of this invasion. They have
been motivated by lies, and as those lies unravel, and as
'coalition' casualties mount (and there is no question that losses
are already significantly higher than has been acknowledged), troop
morale will drop precipitously, if it hasn't begun to do so
already. Iraqi troops, on the other hand, are fighting in defense
of their homeland. Each and every one of them has a personal stake
in repelling the U.S. occupation. They are on their home turf,
fighting in defense of family. U.S. troops are ill prepared for the
ferocity of the fighting that will be required to seize
Baghdad.

As for U.S. troops being
better equipped, there is no question that that is true. The
'coalition' has an enormous technological advantage, and
unquestioned air superiority. But high-tech weapons can be
seriously hampered by low-tech means, and Mother Nature can
sometimes provide a most inhospitable environment for sensitive
electronics. Desert sandstorms and burning trenches, despite
official denials, can wreak havoc with guidance systems.
Sandstorms, in fact, and sand in general, wreak havoc with pretty
much everything. This is true, of course, on the Iraqi side as
well, though one would think that the native peoples have a little
more experience dealing with the special problems posed by desert
warfare.

We as Americans live with
the myth that everything that we do is, by definition, the best,
and that myth certainly extends to our military prowess. But all
that we are really the 'best' at is throwing exorbitant sums of
money at our military services, which means that we are heavily
armed and in possession of a vast array of technological wonders.
But all that can be concluded from that with any certainty is that,
along with an unfathomable number of dead bodies, we will leave
behind in Iraq hundreds of billions of dollars worth of destroyed
military equipment and exploded munitions. Iraq is in a unique
position in this war: it is the only nation that has had an
opportunity to learn first-hand how to defend against the uniquely
American style of modern warfare. These lessons were learned at a
tremendous cost, but they appear to have been translated into
successful military strategies.

It is very unlikely that
the relatively light use of U.S. air power has anything to do with
humanitarian concerns. It is more likely due to the fact that the
Iraqis aren't presenting the 'coalition' with very many targets
that can be hit from the air. Smoke, sand, well- camouflaged Iraqi
equipment deployed in small detachments rather than easily targeted
columns, and the placement of multiple decoys, have all likely
contributed to frustrating U.S. pilots and military planners. So
too has the fact that the Iraqis have held back thus far on
deploying any of their aircraft. They have also made scant use of
rockets and missiles, and have made only partial use of air defense
systems. This is apparently due to a conscious decision to preserve
these weapons for the defense of Baghdad. Despite boasts that
Iraq's failure to wield these weapons represents some kind of
victory for the 'coalition,' it appears as though the Baghdad
regime opted to minimize its up-front losses by keeping key
defensive assets hidden and riding out the initial U.S.
assaults.

While much of this is
speculation at this point, what isn't speculation is that the Beast
is wounded. It is weakened and it will attempt to reassert its
supremacy by taking Baghdad at all costs. And how will it do that?
One has to look no further than the strategy that is being employed
at Umm Qasr: "Coalition commanders insist they are trying to avoid
civilian casualties and preserve as much of Iraq's civil
infrastructure as possible, but officers would rather flush out
snipers with tanks and aircraft than risk their troops on the
ground. 'It makes sense for us to do this,' said one US
commander quoted by Reuters in Umm Qasr yesterday after
Harriers dropped two 500 lb bombs on a building used by Iraqi
resisters. 'Rather than send men in there, we're just going to
destroy it.'"

Baghdad will prove to be
very resistant to being destroyed. Millions of Iraqi people have a
lot riding on the defense of the city. But Team Bush has a lot
riding on the fall of Baghdad. Expect a massive infusion of U.S.
troops. Expect a concerted campaign to lower expectations as a war
that was billed in advance as a war that would be over in days
becomes a campaign that could take weeks ...and then months ...and
then ...? Failure is not an option for the Beast. It will employ
any means it deems necessary to achieve its ends. It will
carpet-bomb residential areas. It will fire-bomb cities. It will
employ every weapon in its arsenal, including the chemical ones and
including the nuclear ones. Indeed, it will deploy chemical
weapons, claim it was the Iraqis who did so, and then use that as a
pretext to step up to nuclear weapons. It will sacrifice tens of
thousands of its native sons and daughters. It will sacrifice an
unlimited number of Iraqis. It will brutally suppress efforts to
hamper its war drive.

The Beast is
wounded and is beginning to panic. These are interesting times we
are living in. PS: I wasn't going to mention it, but
prognostications on the Iraq war were remarkably consistent across
the board. Pundits and theorists in all avenues of the media -
print, broadcast, and the lowly internet - forecast a very short
war. War proponents foresaw a quick and painless war with a happy
ending. Foes of the war foresaw a quick and - for our side -
painless war with devastating consequences for the Iraqi people.
This newsletter, however, stood apart from the crowd and repeatedly
warned that the Iraqis would resist with a fury, and that this war
would be a long and bloody affair in which countless U.S.
casualties would pile up.

This
newsletter also cautioned, in November of last year, that
the U.S. had established legal justification for its war even
without an additional UN Security Council resolution. It was
postulated that the legal argument would go something like this:
"In 1991, resolution 687 provided a blueprint for actions that Iraq
would have to take in order to end hostilities in the area and
restore peace and security. Resolution 687 also explicitly made
fulfillment of those obligations by Iraq a prerequisite for a
ceasefire to go into effect. Iraq has, however, never fulfilled
those obligations. The ceasefire, therefore, never actually went
into effect, and we are still duty-bound to achieve our 'stated
objective of restoring international peace and security in the
area' by 'all necessary means.'"

On March 20, U.S.
Ambassador John Negroponte presented to the UN Security Council the
United States' legal argument justifying its decision to invade
Iraq. As the Los Angeles Times reported, Negroponte "noted that
Resolution 687, which was adopted in April 1991, imposed
disarmament obligations on Iraq that were conditions of the
cease-fire signed at the end of the Gulf War ... 'It has long been
recognized and understood that a material breach of these
obligations removes the basis of the cease-fire and revives the
authority to use force under Resolution 678,' Negroponte
wrote. 'In view of Iraq's material breaches, the basis for
the cease-fire has been removed, and the use of force is authorized
... to restore international peace and security in the
area.'"

Sounds kind of familiar,
doesn't it?

SADDAMGRAD
Saddam Hussein's secret plan to defeat the Bush oil crusade at the
gates of Baghdad. Operation Barbarossa 1941- German Captain von
Rosenbach-Lepinski is said to have told his motorcycle
reconnaissance battalion : "The war with Russia will last only four
weeks."

Saddam, has long been a big
admirer of Joseph Stalin and he has modeled his dictatorship,
nation, internal police terror force, even his looks on the former
communist dictator. He keeps telling his people and us that our
troops will suffer total defeat at the gates of Baghdad. Since
Saddam has an entire library on Stalin and World War II, it would
behoove the overconfident Bush, his oil buddies promoting the war
and our military leaders who have already so badly underestimated
the will of the soldiers and people of Iraq to resist our invasion,
to look closer at Stalin's greatest military victory and Hitler's
greatest defeat. The 1942 -1943 Battle of Stalingrad and battle of
wills and armies between two tyrants also bent on conquest for oil
and resources..

In the summer of 1942,
Hitler ordered Generalfeldmarschall Friedrich Paulus, commanding
Army Group South to attack toward Stalingrad and the Soviet oil
producing areas. The progress was rapid much like the current
"Operation Iraqi Freedom" as the open area was perfect for the
coordinated efforts of the armored spearheads and Nazi air power.
The German's knew the campaign must end before the onslaught of the
frigid Soviet winter, just like we must totally defeat Saddam
before the hot desert summer in Iraq.

Overconfidence and failure
to defend their long flanks doomed the Nazi invaders as they fought
their way into Stalingrad but the soldiers only came out again
through death or as prisoners of war. This was because the German
army, quickly made it to the gates of the city but then were drawn
into house to house fighting which negated the German advantages of
air and armor. Over time, the battle for the city stalemated and
then one frigid, snowy day, Soviet T-34 tanks and infantry streamed
out across the supply lines outside the city, cut off and fatally
trapped the entire German army inside Stalingrad.

I believe Saddam is
planning just such a final defense of Baghdad. Note, the resistance
throughout the built up fertile crescent on our right flank along
the Euphrates River. Saddam, probably has several hundred thousand
troops in and around Baghdad and remember this force is not facing
250,000 plus American and British troops. Probably less than 60,000
combat troops will attempt to conquer Baghdad because much of our
troop strength is actually logistical support and garrison soldiers
and far less than 1 in 5 soldiers are of front-line fighting
caliber. Witness, the recent attack and capture by Iraqi soldiers
of a group of our mechanics.

I urge our leaders to read
their history, and simply substitute the Soviet defense of Southern
Russia and Stalingrad with a possible Saddam defense against our
ill-advised Iraq invasion force. I hope Saddam does not pull this
off but there is the potential for this to take place. Just
substitute, the hot Iraq desert summer temperatures for the frigid,
Soviet winter, the Soviet T-34 armored attack with Iraq's close
range artillery and missiles armed with chemical and biological
agents against an American force faced with temperatures too hot to
maintain their protection suits. Finally substitute the cover of a
Russian blizzard with an Iraqi sandstorm and you will see Saddam's
plan for the defense of Baghdad and his victory over the over
extended American forces.

Robert Fisk: Raw, devastating realities that expose the truth
about Basra Two British soldiers lie dead on a Basra
roadway, a small Iraqi girl – victim of an Anglo American air
strike – is brought to hospital with her intestines spilling
out of her stomach, a terribly wounded woman screams in agony as
doctors try to take off her black dress.An Iraqi general,
surrounded by hundreds of his armed troops, stands in central Basra
and announces that Iraq's second city remains firmly in Iraqi
hands. The unedited al-Jazeera videotape – filmed over the
past 36 hours and newly arrived in Baghdad – is raw, painful,
devastating.

It is also proof that Basra
– reportedly "captured'' and "secured'' by British troops
last week – is indeed under the control of Saddam Hussein's
forces. Despite claims by British officers that some form of
uprising has broken out in Basra, cars and buses continue to move
through the streets while Iraqis queue patiently for gas bottles as
they are unloaded from a government truck.A remarkable part of
the tape shows fireballs blooming over western Basra and the
explosion of incoming – and presumably British –
shells. The short sequence of the dead British soldiers –
over which Tony Blair voiced such horror yesterday – is
little different from dozens of similar clips of dead Iraqi
soldiers shown on British television over the past 12 years,
pictures which never drew any condemnation from the Prime
Minister.

The two Britons, still in
uniform, are lying on a roadway, arms and legs apart, one of them
apparently hit in the head, the other shot in the chest and
abdomen. Another sequence from the same tape shows crowds of Basra
civilians and armed men in civilian clothes, kicking the soldiers'
British Army Jeep and dancing on top of the vehicle. Other men can
be seen kicking the overturned Ministry of Defence trailer, which
the Jeep was towing when it was presumably ambushed.Also
to be observed on the unedited tape – which was driven up to
Baghdad on the open road from Basra – is a British pilotless
drone photo-reconnaissance aircraft, its red and blue roundels
visible on one wing, shot down and lying overturned on a roadway.
Marked "ARMY'' in capital letters, it carries the code sign ZJ300
on its tail and is attached to a large cylindrical pod which
probably contains the plane's camera.

Far more terrible than the
pictures of dead British soldiers, however, is the tape from
Basra's largest hospital that shows victims of the Anglo-American
bombardment being brought to the operating rooms shrieking in pain.
A middle-aged man is carried into the hospital in pyjamas, soaked
head to foot in blood. A little girl of perhaps four is brought
into the operating room on a trolley, staring at a heap of her own
intestines protruding from the left side of her stomach. A
blue-uniformed doctor pours water over the little girl's guts and
then gently applies a bandage before beginning surgery. A woman in
black with what appears to be a stomach wound cries out as doctors
try to strip her for surgery. In another sequence, a trail of blood
leads from the impact of an incoming – presumably British
– shell. Next to the crater is a pair of plastic
slippers.

The al-Jazeera tapes, most
of which have never been seen, are the first vivid proof that Basra
remains totally outside British control. Not only is one of the
city's main roads to Baghdad still open – this is how the
three main tapes reached the Iraqi capital – but General
Khaled Hatem is interviewed in a Basra street, surrounded by
hundreds of his uniformed and armed troops, and telling
al-Jazeera's reporter that his men will "never'' surrender to
Iraq's enemies. Armed Baath Party militiamen can also be seen in
the streets, where traffic cops are directing lorries and buses
near the city's Sheraton Hotel.Mohamed al-Abdullah,
al-Jazeera's correspondent in Basra, must be the bravest journalist
in Iraq right now. In the sequence of three tapes, he can be seen
conducting interviews with families under fire and calmly reporting
the incoming British artillery bombardment. One tape shows that the
Sheraton Hotel on the banks of Shatt al-Arab river has sustained
shell damage.

On the edge of the river
– beside one of the huge statues of Iraq's 1980-88 war
martyrs, each pointing an accusing finger across the waterway
towards Iran – Basra residents can be seen filling jerry cans
from the sewage-polluted river. Five days ago the Iraqi government
said 30 civilians had been killed in Basra and another 63 wounded.
Yesterday, it claimed that more than 4,000 civilians had been
wounded in Iraq since the war began and more than 350 killed. But
Mr Abdullah's tape shows at least seven more bodies brought to the
Basra hospital mortuary over the past 36 hours. One, his head still
pouring blood on to the mortuary floor, was identified as an Arab
correspondent for a Western news agency.

Other harrowing scenes show
the partially decapitated body of a little girl, her red scarf
still wound round her neck. Another small girl was lying on a
stretcher with her brain and left ear missing. Another dead child
had its feet blown away. There was no indication whether American
or British ordnance had killed these children. The tapes give no
indication of Iraqi military casualties. But at a time when the
Iraqi authorities will not allow Western reporters to visit Basra,
this is the nearest to independent evidence we have of continued
resistance in the city and the failure of the British to capture
it. For days the Iraqi have been denying optimistic reports from
"embedded'' reporters – especially on the BBC – who
gave the impression that Basra was "secured'' or otherwise in
effect under British control. This the tape conclusively proves to
be untrue.

There is also a sequence
showing two men, both black, who are claimed by Iraqi troops to be
US prisoners of war. No questions are asked of the men, who are
dressed in identical black shirts and jackets. Both appear nervous
and gaze at the camera crew and Iraqi troops crowded behind them.
Of course, it is still possible that some small-scale opposition to
the Iraqi regime broke out in the city over the past few days, as
British officers have claimed. But, seeing the tapes, it is hard to
imagine that it amounted, if it existed at all, to anything more
than a brief gun battle.The unedited reports
therefore provide damaging proof that Anglo-American spokesmen have
not been telling the truth about the battle for Basra. And in the
end this is far more devastating to the invading armies than the
sight of two dead British soldiers or – since Iraqi lives are
as sacred as British lives – than the pictures of dead Iraqi
children.

Al-Jazeera Calls on U.S. to Ensure Free Press LONDON
(Reuters - 26 March) - Banned on Wall Street and wiped off the
Internet, Arab news channel al-Jazeera defended its controversial
coverage of the Iraq war on Wednesday and demanded the United
States come to its aid in the name of a free press.

Al-Jazeera, which angered
the United States by showing footage of dead and captured American
soldiers, said it was deeply concerned after two of its reporters
were banned from the New York Stock Exchange and its Web sites were
hacked. "There has to be a national effort to protect the freedom
of the press even more," said al-Jazeera spokesman Jihad Ballout.
"We appeal to authorities to pay attention to this."

Al-Jazeera has taken the
Arab world by storm since its launch in 1996, with its
controversial reporting and brash, Western style drawing an
audience of more than 35 million. After making its name in the
Afghan war with exclusive footage of Osama bin laden, the
Qatar-based satellite channel has also had success in Europe, with
viewers doubling since the start of the Iraq war.But
the CNN of the Arab world has faced an uphill battle in the world's
largest media market, the United States.

Al-Jazeera raised the ire
of Americans on Sunday when it aired shaken U.S. prisoners of war
and dead U.S. soldiers with gaping bullet wounds, prompting the
Pentagon to issue a rare appeal to U.S. networks not to use the
footage. On Wednesday, it also showed pictures of what it said were
two dead British soldiers and two British prisoners of
war.

EUROPEAN VIEWERS DOUBLE In
Europe, al-Jazeera said it had signed up more than four million
subscribers in the past week, adding to the four million it already
has. But in the United States, it has been slow to catch on with
little more than 100,000 subscribers."In Europe, we're naturally
most popular in countries with big Muslim populations like France.
In Britain, we've also seen a pick up in non-Arabic-speaking
Muslims," Ballout said.Viewers, who subscribe
through local satellite operators, are glued to the pictures even
if they cannot understand the words. There are no English-language
subtitles.

As the storm over the
American soldier footage raged this week, the New York Stock
Exchange withdrew credentials for two al-Jazeera journalists. It
said it had to cut back on the number of reporters on the exchange
floor. Media pundits were stunned by the exchange's decision,
saying it smacked of a dangerous opening salvo in a game of media
quid pro quo which could see Western media's access cut off. Iraq
last week ordered CNN journalists to leave Baghdad.

"The New York Stock
Exchange has many useful functions, especially in turbulent times.
Making foreign policy is not one of them," the New York Times wrote
in a Wednesday editorial. Al-Jazeera's new English-language Web site,
which went live on Monday, and its Arabic-language
site were downed by a hacker attack on Tuesday and
Wednesday. "This is yet another example of people trying to
interfere with freedom of expression and the press," Ballout said.
Comment: Asking the US to ensure
freedom of the press is like asking Ari Fleischer to tell the
truth. It aint gonna happen.

More U.S. troops, armor head to Iraq As President Bush
declared the war in Iraq would last "however long it takes to win,"
the Pentagon said Thursday that 130,000 more troops were being
deployed to the Persian Gulf region. The first wave of about 30,000
soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division and other unidentified units
based at Fort Hood, Texas, were expected to deploy in the next few
days, Pentagon officials told CNN. Another 100,000 ground troops
will be deployed to the region next month, most of them in armored
divisions and mechanized units. Officials said the deployments
represent a continuation of the Pentagon's plan and not a change in
strategy. Comment: Yeah right, just
keep talking and I'll keep shovellin. That makes about 450,000 in
total, this is obviously an invasion force, not just into Iraq but
into the whole of the middle east.

Bombers return to Baghdad with a vengeance Allied forces
took advantage of a break in the weather overnight to give Baghdad
its heaviest aerial bombardment in days in an attempt to crush
Iraqi command and communication centres. Iraqi officials said at
least seven people had died.Hours after defiant remarks
by defence minister Sultan Hashem Ahmed, that the city would have
to be taken street by street, a US B-2 stealth bomber dropped two
4,700-pound, satellite-guided "bunker busting" bombs on a major
communications tower on the east bank of the Tigris
River.

Another bomb was later
reported to have destroyed the Baath party headquarters in Baghdad.
Iraqi TV showed bodies being carried from the rubble. US Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld suggested US forces lay siege to
Baghdad rather than invade, in hopes its citizens would rebel
against the government.Air assaults zeroed in on
one of Saddam's presidential compounds in the heart of the capital,
and Republican Guard positions around the city. Powerful explosions
continued through the night, with a string of strong blasts before
and after dawn.

The attack gutted a
seven-story telephone exchange building in an area called Al-Alwya,
leaving the street strewn with slabs of concrete, irons rods and
corrugated metal.Husein Moeini, telecommunications director of
Baghdad, said he believed people were buried beneath the rubble,
but journalists who arrived at the scene less than three hours
after it was hit did not see a rescue operation under way.
Comment:
The suggestion of this last comment is that the report of deaths is
not confirmed and may be suspect. Let me ask this: If you drop a
5,000lb bomb on a densly populated city of 5 million people, how
the hell are you gonna NOT kill people?? Take a look at these stats of
the a "mere" 2000lb JDAM bomb and ask yourself how could anyone but
the most callous and inhuman drop such a weapon on a civilian area.
Rumsfeld suggests that the US lay siege to Baghdad, in the hope
that the civilians will rebel - what a swell guy - Kind of spells
out the predicament the Anglo-American invaders are in; they are
resorting starving 5 million people to force them to overthrow the
government because they cant do it themselves. Or maybe its that
Rumsfeld just likes to see innocent people suffer and
die.

50 Civilians killed in Mosul raid A HEAVY air raid by US
and British coalition forces has killed or wounded more than 50
civilians in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, al-Jazeera
television has reported from the scene The station's correspondent
said seven houses were destroyed in an unidentified district and
that many inhabitants were fleeing. They were enraged because no
military targets were in the vicinity, it was claimed. One resident
told the Arab station that "at least 50 children" were hit, along
with an "incalculable" number of women. Footage from the area
showed destroyed houses and trucks filled with bags and baggage
leaving the scene. Mosul, a city of some 300,000 in a majority
Kurdish region, has been bombarded several times by the coalition
fighting to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, according to
al-Jazeera. However, the report said the bombing raid yesterday
afternoon (AEDT) had caused the first heavy casualties.Comment: Seems the Anglo-American forces have
changed tactics in regard to civilians, in light of the fact that
the general population is not disposed to waving flags and
welcoming the invaders, (surprise surprise), they now seem to be
attempting to bomb them into accepting the "inevitable" control and
domination by a foreign power.

A
'Turkey Shoot,' but With Marines as the Targets CAMP VIPER,
Southern Iraq, March 27 -- Marine Cpl. Bret Woolhether heard the
first round and tried to take cover, but it was too late. "I just
turned my head, saw the flash of white, saw the warm red running
down my hand," the 20-year-old from Fond du Lac, Wis., recalled at
a hospital today. "I thought it was the end. I saw that round hit.
I thought I was done." They call it the turkey shoot, and they are
the targets. Every day, Marines trying to keep critical supply
lines open to forward units heading toward Baghdad run a gantlet
through the strategic crossroads city of Nasiriyah -- over one
bridge, up a few miles and then over another bridge. If they make
it without getting shot at, they are lucky.

The passage, about 100
miles north of the Kuwaiti border, has become perhaps the most
treacherous few miles in Iraq. A contingent of about 120 Marines
trying to make it to the first bridge Wednesday came under fire
from assault weapons and rocket-propelled grenades; about 15 of
their Humvees and seven-ton trucks were destroyed and more than 60
of the Marines were wounded. "Nasiriyah was supposed to be a
six-hour fight," said Gunnery Sgt. Tracy Hale, 32, of Philadelphia,
who was injured in the battle and brought to the field hospital
here. "It's already been five days. Five days of nonstop, 24-hour
fighting."

From the perspective of
commanders directing the war, Nasiriyah has proved to be a
strategic success. The Marines captured two vital bridges and have
moved hundreds of tanks, armored vehicles, fuel trucks, Humvees and
other military vehicles across them in the last few days to build
up forces heading toward Baghdad. From the perspective of Marines
fighting the war, however, Nasiriyah has proved to be a nightmare.
The Marines leapfrog forward across the bridges, a new unit coming
to relieve the one that heads across, constantly moving to maintain
momentum. With so many civilians nearby, it is never clear who is
friend and who is foe.

"Each unit takes its turn
being sacrificed," said Sgt. Chris Merkle, 31, from Irvine, Calif.,
who made the run the other day. "Everybody gets torn apart the same
way." Nasiriyah became a critical juncture early on in U.S. war
planning because of the crossings over the Euphrates River. It
became a killing field over the weekend with a pair of grisly
disasters for U.S. troops. An Army convoy that made a wrong turn
drove into an Iraqi ambush that left 12 soldiers dead or captured.
In a separate incident, at least nine Marines died in the fighting.
A military source said today that preliminary indications suggested
they might have been killed by fire from an A-10 Thunderbolt II
ground attack plane trying to help them.

Lt. Gen. James T. Conway,
the top Marine commander in the region, visited Nasiriyah the next
day to inspect the battlefield and came close to two or three gun
battles himself, according to his chief of staff, Col. John
Coleman. "It's the Wild West there," Coleman said. "We control what
we want to control, but it's not a very safe place." Iraqis
mounting the attacks appear to be a mix of Saddam's Fedayeen, a
paramilitary group loyal to President Saddam Hussein, and regular
army soldiers. Marine officers said they have found bodies of
regular Iraqi army soldiers with gunshots to the head, an
indication, they believe, that the Fedayeen or Republican Guard
commanders have been forcing soldiers to fight and killing those
who do not.

While Republican Guard
commanders apparently have come to Nasiriyah to help organize the
attacks on the Marines, they do not stay once the fighting begins,
according to U.S. military intelligence. The fighters themselves
generally dress in civilian clothing, making it harder to
distinguish them from noncombatants. For the Marines driving
through the area every day, it has been hard to know how or where
to concentrate their firepower. With many of the attackers out of
uniform and hiding behind civilians, Marines said they have had to
refrain from returning fire, according to several interviewed today
at an 80-bed field hospital that opened here in southern Iraq on
Wednesday.

"It's a turkey shoot," said
Merkle, a reservist who normally works as a FedEx delivery man.
"It's not an actual engagement. You're just receiving fire and
trying to get through as fast as you can." At one point, Merkle
recalled, some Iraqi fighters pretended to surrender. "As they're
surrendering, the Marines told them, 'Put down your weapons, put
down your weapons,' " he said. "They ran back into the building and
pushed the kids out the windows and doors. The kids started running
because they were scared and then the men ran out
shooting."

On Tuesday, the Marines
found Iraqi paramilitary forces using a hospital in Nasiriyah as a
base to stage hit-and-run missions. "We went to a hospital and a
doctor started to shoot at us," said Khalid Anzi, 34, a Kuwaiti
working as an interpreter for the Marines. "The Marines don't shoot
back, they talk and they call the other people to come out." Hours
after surrounding the building, Marines took 170 Iraqis captive and
found 200 weapons, loads of ammunition, 3,000 chemical protection
suits and a tank in the hospital compound, officers have said. The
situation left Anzi fighting tears as he sat in a recovery tent
today with his friend and fellow translator, Duaij Mohammed, 32,
who was sliced by shrapnel. "Bad, bad, bad situation there," Anzi
said softly. "Believe me, if you see with your own eyes, you would
cry."Comment: The criminal tactics of
the Iraqi soldiers of dressing as civilians and using them for
cover needs to be weighed against the overall criminal act of the
Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. The invasion is being presented as
just and right, when in reality nothing could be further from the
truth. The Iraqis are defending against the attempted agressive
take over of their country by a nation with infinitely superior
forces and fire power in any way they can. What are they expected
to do?

US refuses to rule out its ultimate weapon The White House
has again refused to rule out using nuclear weapons against Iraq if
Saddam Hussein launches a chemical or biological attack. Asked
about the latest claims in the Los Angeles Times that the US was
considering using a "nuclear bunker-buster" bomb in Iraq or
"mini-nukes", White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said: "It's well
known that the United States' long-standing policy about the use of
nuclear weapons is that we don't rule anything in and we don't rule
anything out." Comment:

March 27,
2003Today's edition ofBrought to You by
The Bush Junta, Produced and Directed by the CIA, based on an
original script by Henry Kissinger, with a cast of billions....The
"Greatest Shew on Earth," no doubt, and if you don't have a good
sense of humor, don't read this page! It is designed to reveal the
"unseen." If you can't stand the heat of Objective Reality, get out
of the kitchen!

The Future History Of
Planet EarthSince at least the time of
the biblical prophets and the Oracle of Delphi, the attempt to
foretell the future has captivated the imagination of our species.
Hal Lindsey's "Late Great Planet Earth" and his many other books
represent a modern attempt at fortune-telling, in a Christian
Zionist mold. More reputable commentators hesitate to make many
predictions, because they know how notoriously fickle and
inscrutable The Future truly is, and how much is dependent on the
random chaos of events, the unpredictability of human free will,
the creative fountain of technological innovation, and the
importance of Great Men. Today, sooth-saying has something of a bad
reputation, and only the very brave, the foolhardy and the deluded
seem to have the courage to make predictions.

As proprietors of our little-known website (www.911-strike.com),
otherwise employed in relatively mundane tasks in the low-rent
districts of the American empire, the authors (Jerry Russell and
Richard Stanley) have nonetheless decided to grasp for the brass
ring of success in the art of divining the future. Perhaps the
(posthumous) fame of Nostradamus shall await us if we succeed.
Although we certainly would prefer that like the humiliated
Cassandra and the proverbial Chicken Little, our dire prophecies
will not come to pass.

In the words of the great old warrior and Ku Klux Klan member,
Senator Robert Byrd -- "We are truly sleepwalking through history."
To be more precise, we are sleepwalking into the beginning of a
vast world war whose purpose is to achieve a larger hidden global
agenda. Or rather, there is nothing new about this World War -- it
is a continuation of the Thousand Year War which has been known as
the Crusades. Beyond any doubt, George W. Bush used that language
with full knowledge and intent as he commenced the battle for
Afghanistan last year. It was designed to inflame the anger of the
entire Islamic world.

The goal of the current phase of the war is the conquest and
subjugation of the Arab oil nations of the Middle East, to bring
them entirely under the neocolonial control of an Anglo-Aryan
dominated West and their American and Zionist proxies. Powerful
elites believe that this is necessary because the Western nations
need to have control of the profits, the "economic rent", that
comes from ownership of oil. Up until now, the West has abetted the
seemingly contradictory, but purposeful, antics of Saudi Arabian
and Kuwaiti royalty, and the profitably schismatic Shiite Islamic
populism of Iran, but the diversion of revenue -- and the potential
that Islam will develop real, independent political and military
power -- can no longer be tolerated.

In this great manipulated war against the Arabs, both Americans and
Europeans have their role. Americans will do the on-the-ground
fighting and dying. To accomplish this, America must be truly and
deeply motivated to fight. This is being accomplished, and will be
accomplished, through a cynical manipulation of the history of
World War II, and the religion of Christian Zionism. We can see
some of this in the President Bush's invocation of the "Saddam =
Hitler" paradigm, which is illustrated most clearly with the "he
gassed his own people" motif. As almost everyone knows, the
horrific gas chambers of Auschwitz were the most essential
embodiment, the primal horror, of Hitlerism. With the prayer of
"never again", Americans are now bravely going forward, once again,
to rid the world of this new "Hitlerian" scourge, the man who would
gas his own people.

As the Americans play the role of the "bad cop", threatening the
Arab world with nuclear destruction, the Europeans, Russia and the
United Nations are playing the role of the "good cop". Exquisitely
diplomatic, they beg the Arabs not to use their stocks of chemical
and biological weapons, and to avoid even thinking about the
nuclear option. By means of such diplomacy, Iraq has been presented
to the US like a lamb for slaughter. In order to prevent the game
from becoming too obvious, and to prolong the Iraqi agony, Russia
and others are now (in all probability) supplying Iraq with a
clandestine flow of weapons. But we expect this will not be
anywhere near enough to turn the tide, and America will eventually
emerge victorious.

Beyond Iraq, we do not pretend to know how quickly this war will
progress, nor by what fits and starts. Already there are signs that
George Bush may have botched the opening moves of the game, and the
establishment is bringing forth contingency plans for a quick
change of leadership. Also, it is quite likely at some point that
the American economy might go into a hyperinflationary shock,
especially if oil shortages cause fuel prices to skyrocket upwards.
Such an inflationary episode would be highly damaging to the world
economy (which relies on the health of the Dollar as a reserve
currency) but it would be even more damaging to the US, which would
be cut-off from its supplies of all sorts of internationally
manufactured goods. No matter, the US economy will be re-built by
international banking interests as a sort of Satanic mill, like
Stalin's industrial base in the Ural Mountains and Siberia during
World War II.

Regardless of any setbacks or delays, there is no sign that the
elites have changed their agenda, and no sign that the populace of
the US will rise up to demand a change in the war policy. Thus,
over the years (or months) to come, we can expect that the war will
proceed from Iraq into Iran or Syria. Once that happens, the Arabs
may fully live up to their reputation as new Hitlers. Unlike
Saddam's Iraq, Iran and Syria may actually have vast stores of
chemical and biological weapons, and (in spite of all "good-cop"
diplomatic efforts by the Europeans at the UN) they probably will
not hesitate to use them against invading American troops, as they
see the die being cast. Iran most likely has nuclear weapons (if
not now, they soon will) and whatever of these can be mustered,
will most likely be used as well. Also, we believe that ultimately,
the Arabs will lash out not only at the newly hated Americans, but
also against their ancient dialectic enemies the Israelis.

One possible scenario is that the ancient Holy Land of Jesus and
Abraham will be left as a wasteland, a poisoned, radioactive
cinder, with no one left alive. The Christian Zionists who are
cheering this scenario forward, will be disappointed in the
outcome. The Temple of Jerusalem will never be rebuilt, and Jesus
Christ will not return in glory to complete the Rapture script
(which will be utterly unmasked as false prophecy). However, in
view of the horror that actually unfolds, and depending upon
circumstances and alternative contingency plans, the peoples of
Europe and Russia may unite behind the Americans in the goal of the
ultimate conquest of the lands of Islam -- unless (against all
odds) they manifest their growing revulsion at the incongruent and
hypocritical behavior of America, by joining the Arabs.

In any case, because the corporate media and government duped
Americans will be the most outraged and the most hurt, they will
continue to bear the brunt of the fighting.
While the Muslims are being cast (to the American audience) in the
global role of Hitler, the American President Bush (and his
successors and global agenda associates) are the ones who are truly
reincarnating his every move, like a script from a bad spaghetti
western (for mostly global consumption). The highly productive
activist Carol Brouillet remarked that Bush should be sued for
plagiarism, as he is following the Hitler script so carefully.

To the extent that Hitler's evil has been mythologized and rendered
bigger-than-life, Bush is following the script rather than the
reality. For example, the true story of the Reichstag Fire might be
that a drunk Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, really was
responsible for burning the German legislature. (Or not -- the
controversy rages on.) At any rate, Hitler took the blame in the
eyes of history. But the destruction of the World Trade Center was
a true instance of fake terror, so cold-blooded that almost NO ONE
can bring themselves to conceive of it.

Whatever the Hitler reality was, if Bush continues to follow the
Hitler archetype, we can expect to confront the gas chamber script
as well. Perhaps not exactly Death Chambers (which would tip off
even the most oblivious American as to the reality of the
situation) but some other high-tech means will be implemented to
destroy American Muslims, Blacks who might be construed as Muslims,
anti-war protestors, non-conformists, and other convenient
political and economic target victims by the millions, while making
headlines around the world.

Finally, after the Arab world is conquered, then Europe and Asia
will unite to defeat the Americans as well, with yet another
massive ground invasion. Few Americans will have the heart to
fight, after the atrocities of the US government are fully
understood. American casualties in the final battles will be light
(although starvation and cold will kill many), and the American
industrial base will be preserved.

Perhaps famine and disease will sweep the Third World, and
Indo-Europeans of Aryan heritage will finally inherit the whole
world as their homeland. If the powerful and wealthy elites have
their way, they will rule over this great unified kingdom as feudal
Lords, like Gods incarnate, such as the ancient Pharaohs of Egypt.
But we do not believe that their plan of Great World Empire will
ever come to pass; it never has and never will. When this current
World War is over, conflict will be brewing once again, perhaps
between the Asiatic powers of Russia and China.

How dare we predict such a future? Unlike the ancient oracle at
Delphi, we have no secrets to hide. And unlike Hal Lindsey and his
ilk, we have no use for hocus-pocus. Read on, and all will be
revealed....

Former Pentagon official Richard Perle resigns as key
Rumsfeld adviser Former Pentagon official Richard Perle
resigned Thursday as chairman of a group that advises Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld on policy issues, saying he did not want a
controversy over his business dealings to district from Rumsfeld's
management of the war in Iraq.In a brief statement,
Rumsfeld thanked Perle for his service and said he was grateful
that the former Reagan administration official had agreed to remain
a board member. Rumsfeld made no reference to a reason for Perle
giving up the chairmanship.

Perle said he was stepping
aside voluntarily. ''I have seen controversies like that before and
I know that this one will inevitably distract from the urgent
challenge in which you are now engaged,'' Perle wrote in a
resignation letter. Comment: Sure,
nothing to do with the fact that you are a crook and a liar,
jointly responsible for the current phony war in Iraq and profiting
from the deaths of US soldiers and innocent Iraqi
civilians.

What You Aren't
Being Told About Iraq Remember all those "intelligence
sources" who promised that Iraqis would be cheering as the U.S. and
U.K. armies rolled into Basra or Nasiriyah or any major town in
southern Iraq? Apparently, in day 7 of the invasion of Iraq, these
intelligence sources and their data are proving to be fallible.
Unfortunately, the North American public is not told who the
intelligence sources are. No, they aren't CIA, NSA, or the FBI.
They aren't MI-5 or the SAS. They aren't even spies working in
Iraq. They are members of the Iraqi National Congress(INC), an
Iraqi opposition group made up of millionaires and businessmen,
former Ba'athist henchmen, and generals who aided Saddam in his
formative years but felt threatened by him and defected. Most of
the INC's ruling hierarchy is comprised of people who have not set
foot in Iraq in more than 30 years. Some have never set foot in
Iraq. And yet they claim to be experts.

Many members of the INC
have personal vendettas against Saddam himself; former aides or
accomplices who would believe they should be in his place. The INC
has long believed that they can never wrestle control from Saddam
(because no one in Iraq much cares for them and considers them
charlatans) and must rely on outside help - the U.S. Consequently,
the INC launched a massive public relations gambit to convince the
U.S. that it should intervene in Iraq. (Earlier in March, the CIA
admitted that an invaluable document linking Niger with Iraqi
efforts to purchase uranium had been forged - a claim initially
made by IAEA head Mohammed Al Baradei. The CIA said that the
document had been forged by a third party. Guess who? No, not
Israel. The INC.)

They met with members of
the neo-conservative lobby (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Donald
Rumsfeld, etc) and gave them exactly the type of information
everyone was waiting to hear. "Enter Iraq with a formidable army,
and the people will greet you with open arms and cheers." No one
stopped to question whether the INC was really telling the truth or
whether 13 years of sanctions, which have crippled Iraqi society,
may have played a role in slightly altering this view. So, with a
valiant cheer letting loose the bastard dogs of war, the U.S.
administration took the INC advice, sold the U.S. public on the
idea and ignored the advice of most of the senior military brass
warning that an invasion would not be a cake-walk.Iraq
scoffed at the notion of Iraqis embracing the invading armies and
promised hell instead.

That may yet prove
true.

In the first few hours of
the war, Iraqis in Baghdad hinted to this writer that some would
welcome U.S. forces. However, the night of "shock and awe" changed
all that. Iraqi sources inside Iraq are now saying the bombing
campaigns shocked the Iraqis to the spectre of annihilation as
poorly equipped hospitals began to quickly fill up with civilian
casualties and fatalities. Iraqi doctors were awed by the lack of
medicine and proper facilities to treat the wounded as U.N.
sanctions have crippled the Iraqi health care system. U.S. media,
largely CNN, dedicated nearly 0.5 percent of their airtime to the
civilian toll in Iraq. Instead, they showed us interviews with
"Iraqis" living in the U.S. who were cheering the war. I recently
asked a prominent Iraqi exile what he thought of the statements
made by these Iraqis. He advised me to look at how long they have
been outside Iraq and reminded me that bombs weren't falling on
them.

Furthermore, what do you
expect an Iraqi in the U.S. to say after hearing that the FBI was
inviting some 11,000 U.S. based Iraqis to 'voluntary' interviews
(MSNBC reports that the FBI has already interviewed 5,000 Iraqis in
the U.S.) and that some Iraqis have been held for visa violations?
As an Iraqi living in the U.S., a country about to invade your
former country and sustain casualties, would you dare to say you
oppose the war? Would you dare to say what you really felt in the
post-9/11 frame of mind towards Muslims and Arabs? No. You will
tell them exactly what you know they want to hear, just like the
INC, because you would fear for your future status in the
U.S.

Another bit of
misinformation that circulated is that once coalition forces
'liberate' southern Iraq, they would find the local populace taking
up arms and fighting Saddam's loyalist forces. This couldn't be
further from the truth. After their defeat in Kuwait in 1991,
Saddam's forces launched a bloody campaign against what they termed
"Iraqi traitors and insurgents" in the south of Iraq. Any Iraqi
rebel forces that survived that onslaught either fled to Saudi
Arabia and ultimately for other destinations, or to Iran. In Iran,
most were given sanctuary and some joined armed Iraqi forces there.
One such force is the Badr Brigade, which is currently in the north
of Iraq and vowing to fight Saddam loyalists in their own private
war.

Other survivors of the 1991
backlash flooded the U.K. and the U.S. where they have been ever
since. So who remains to 'rise up'?

The people of Basra, say
the INC.

Let me get this straight:
the same people of Basra that were denied clean water facilities
because the U.S. barred Iraq from importing vital water filtration
systems for the past 13 years? The same Basra where the effects of
depleted uranium used by coalition forces in the last Gulf war have
been documented by dozens of investigative medical organizations as
causing cancer, disease, and other deformities? The same Basra
where typhoid and cholera have become rampant because of the
U.S.-supported U.N. sanctions? The same Basra where U.S. and U.K.
fighter jets have struck in the past 12 years of the no-fly zone
and inflicted heavy civilian casualties? Or is it the Basra where
civilian casualties number in the hundreds in this current war? The
same Basra where an Iraqi father carried the limp body of his
daughter, her right foot, barely identifiable, shattered and barely
attached by a piece of dangling flesh (picture published in Globe
and Mail - March 24, 2003)? That Basra?

Or is it the Basra where
the local Iraqis have been without water and electricity for the
past three days and are facing a humanitarian crisis? Iraqis want a
regime change? Yes, possibly, but the better question is, do they
want it imposed from the outside with set rules and regulations
dictated terms? Then the picture gets a bit hazy. Tell the Iraqis
that it is the U.S., the country they have been led to believe is
the cause of all their travesty and suffering, that is coming to
liberate them, and the picture becomes even more blurry. The
millionaires of the INC didn't care to provide the coalition with
the real picture of events and conditions in Iraq. They wanted a
war at all costs. Today, the U.K. military forces near Basra have
reported that the city is witnessing a civil uprising. Within
hours, an Al Jazeera reporter reporting from the heart of Basra
refuted these claims. So did Iraqi TV. At press time, Iraqi TV and
all telecommunications facilities in Baghdad were targeted and
claimed to have been knocked off the air. Ninety minutes later,
Iraqi TV was back on the air and showed footage of a downed
Predator drone in Basra

Blair’s press conference: lies and self-delusion
Prime Minister Tony Blair’s monthly press conference, held
Tuesday, March 25, was a distasteful spectacle.For months a
sycophantic British media has attempted to excuse the
government’s support for a US-led war against Iraq, in
defiance of popular opposition, with reference to the prime
minister’s sincerely held beliefs. Whereas President George
W. Bush may be an arrogant bully and an idiot, motivated by naked
American self-interest, most media pundits have insisted that Blair
is animated by the highest moral and ethical standards—which
even his opponents are supposed to take on good faith

Tuesday’s display
again confirmed that the British prime minister is just as much at
ease with lies, distortions and self-delusion as his US
counterpart. If he is sincere in anything it is in his
determination to aggressively assert the interests of British
imperialism against those of the poor and oppressed masses of the
world.Blair addressed his first
press conference of this war as the political representative of a
ruling class with a long and brutal history of colonial oppression
against Iraq—until it was finally chased out in
1958—and as the premier ally of the Bush administration. If
he sought to shroud the revival of British colonialism in the guise
of its “civilising mission”, he was simply continuing
another well-worn tradition—one no less venal and fraudulent
for the passage of time.

“Iraq used to be one
of the most sophisticated countries in the whole of the Middle East
... now Baghdad and other cities have actually become like Third
World countries,” he said. Under Saddam Hussein’s rule,
much of the population has been reduced to conditions of virtual
starvation, with some 60 percent of the Iraqi people currently
dependent on the government for food aid. The “mortality
rates for under fives in Baghdad is higher than in
Mozambique” and “around nearly one million children
died because of malnutrition and because of leukaemia,” he
continued.

Consequently, “The
most important humanitarian priority is to restore the operations
of the Oil for Food Program,” Blair pronounced. Blair could
present this tissue of lies and half-truths without fear of
contradiction from the massed ranks of the British press, who are
well aware that the conditions he outlined are the direct result of
the military and economic actions undertaken by the US, the UK and
the United Nations. The UN’s own studies have shown that
Iraq’s descent from being one of the wealthiest countries in
the Middle East, with a relatively developed system of welfare and
high standards of literacy and skills, to one of the more
impoverished is the direct result of sanctions.

From the first Gulf war in
1991, through 12 years of UN sanctions, to the present-day
offensive involving tons of bombs and missiles and hundreds of
thousands of occupying troops, the US, with British backing, has
sought to destroy a civilisation and bring the Iraqi people to
their knees so as to seize the country’s resources and
establish America’s domination over the Middle East.
Moreover, as journalist John Pilger has pointed out, as of July
2002 the US, again with British backing, has blocked $5.4 billion
worth of humanitarian supplies to Iraq—despite it being
approved by the UN and paid for by Iraq. Denis Halliday, former
coordinator of the “oil for food” program who resigned
in protest at the embargo, described its effects as “nothing
less than genocide”.

Blair’s references to
the growing incidence of cancer in Iraq are equally cynical, as
this is directly attributable to the tons of depleted
uranium-tipped shells and missiles unleashed on Iraq’s towns
and cities during the last Gulf war.Given that the US/UK
coalition is continuing to pound Iraq with the same type of
munitions, only in even greater quantities, it can be expected that
the rates of such terrible and often fatal diseases will
skyrocket.

Blair’s claim that
restoring humanitarian aid is a “priority” of the US/UK
forces is no less of a gross falsification. Not only is the US/UK
military offensive wholly responsible for stopping food and medical
supplies reaching much of the population, it has made a dire
situation even worse. Once it became clear that the US intended to
press ahead with its war plans regardless of international opinion,
humanitarian aid agencies were forced to withdraw from the
country.Not only have food and
medical supplies been halted, but in the city of Basra, for
example, most of the 600,000 population have been without water and
electricity for almost one week due to the bombing.

UN Secretary General Kofi
Annan has warned of an impending humanitarian disaster, and has
called on the US/UK forces to urgently begin dispatching food
supplies. But the US and the UK insist that these can only be
resumed once they have obtained their military objectives. It
should be noted that in the $76 billion (£50 billion) war
budget presented by Bush to US Congress, just $1.7 billion is
targeted for reconstruction and $500 million for humanitarian
aid.It is hardly surprising
that the US/UK invasion has not been greeted by masses of cheering
people in the streets, as Blair and others had claimed would be the
case, but with determined resistance and popular hostility. Even
the highly censored dispatches coming from Iraq have been forced to
mention widespread resistance to the “coalition of the
willing”, including reports that thousands of Iraqi
exiles—outraged at seeing their country overrun once again by
imperialist forces—are returning home to fight the American
and British aggressors.

One journalist was moved to
ask Blair whether there was the “real danger that ... many
Iraqis regard western forces as invaders and
occupiers.”Blair dismissed the very
idea. People were simply too afraid of the regime to do anything at
the moment, he said. Until the “Iraqi people know for sure
that the regime that they despise is on the way out, they will hold
back,” he maintained.Blair’s contention is
that the main reason why the invasion has not provoked a popular
uprising against Saddam is that many Iraqis feel let down by
refusal of the western powers to support their attempted uprising
against Hussein in 1991 following the last Gulf war. Even if this
were the case, such reticence would be hardly surprising, and Blair
makes no attempt to account for why this stand was taken at the
time and why anyone should trust the US and Britain now. But most
importantly, he cannot even conceive of legitimate issues of
national sovereignty and self-determination motivating popular
resistance to imperialist invasion. Yet even as he spoke, crowds of
thousands filled Baghdad’s central market square, waving
their fists and denouncing the American and British
forces.

Tellingly, Blair pointed to
Umm Qasr, “where British troops are now patrolling the
streets”, as a sign of Britain “making it clear to
people that we are there to help them, and we are there genuinely
to liberate their country.”In the topsy-turvy world of
official war propaganda, the sight of armed soldiers patrolling the
streets at the behest of an aggressive foreign power is meant to
reassure the Iraqi people of Britain’s good intent.Blair’s specious
logic will ultimately be used to provide the justification for
horrific atrocities. For if, as he asserts, opposition to Hussein
equals de facto support for the US and Britain then, conversely,
anyone who opposes the invasion supports Hussein.This
absurd bit of logical reductionism is everywhere applied to
international opponents of the US/UK war policy, whether it is the
French or German governments or the millions of protestors around
the world.

In the case of Iraq, then,
any resistance must by definition come from agents of Saddam
Hussein. And consequently any action taken to eliminate them is a
legitimate and justified war measure. Such claims will be used to
sanction the wanton bombing of civilian areas, as well as the
murderous actions of special operations forces and others on the
ground. The designation of Basra’s capture as a
“military objective” and the open targeting of civilian
infrastructure such as television broadcasting stations show that
this is already under way.

Iraq war: suspected war criminal at the side of Bush?
The poison gas attack carried out in the northern Iraqi city of
Halabja which killed several thousand Kurdish civilians in March
1988 has been continually used by US president Bush and other
leading representatives of the American government to justify a
change of government in Iraq. There is now extensive evidence that
the person responsible for this atrocity is actively participating
in the current war against Iraq—and he is fighting on the
side of the US.

Nizar Al-Khazraji, was the
head of the Iraqi army between 1987 and 1990. On Sunday March 16,
he disappeared from Denmark where he had been living in exile for
the past four years. According to reports in the Danish newspaper
BT, he was picked up close to his home by CIA agents, transported
to the German city of Hamburg, and then flown in a military plane
to Saudi Arabia. All of this is alleged to have taken place with
his agreement.

Last weekend the Washington
Post reported Iraqi exile sources as saying that Al-Khazraji was
now in Qatar, the operational headquarters of US Central Command,
along with another former Iraqi general, Najib Sahli. Sahli is also
the subject of a war crime investigation in Denmark over the use of
chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war. They are both thought to
be imparting their knowledge of the Iraqi army to the US
military.

Al-Khazraji was being held
under house arrest in Denmark and investigated for his role in war
crimes. He has been accused of ordering the poison gas attack on
Halabja and also being responsible for the deaths of tens of
thousands of Kurds. Al-Khazraji denies the charges but there is no
doubt that he was the commanding officer of Iraqi forces during a
period of intense Iraqi military action against the
Kurds.

He fell into disfavour in
Iraq and left the country in 1995 . Four years later he moved to
Denmark which refused to agree on terms of political exile but at
the same time tolerated his presence in the country under
circumstances where it was evident he could not be sent back to
Iraq. The Danish parliamentary opposition demanded an inquiry and
accused the government of doing a favour to the CIA by deliberately
allowing Al-Khazraji to enter the country. The right-wing Danish
ruling coalition led by Anders Fogh Rasmussen is one of the few
European governments to fully back the war path of president
Bush.

Al-Khazraji has publicly
stated in several interviews that he would like to join the combat
front line. But the police, who had been ordered to watch over his
apartment, were withdrawn shortly before the start of the war,
conveniently allowing him to slip away. Those familiar with
US-Iraqi relations will be hardly surprised to learn that one of
the men responsible for the massacre of Kurds in 1988 is now
working with the CIA. It is very probable that Al-Khazraji’s
links to the CIA date back to before his departure from Iraq. In
1988 Washington actively backed the Iraqi army in its war against
Iran.

The US and other western
countries delivered the know-how, the laboratories and the
substances necessary to produce the poison gas that was also used
against Iranian soldiers. This is why there is so little said in
the west about the events which took place in Halabja. Those in
charge of the White House in 1988 were president George Bush
senior, the current American vice president Richard Cheney and
current defence minister Donald Rumsfeld—the latter pair are
key figures today in the war against Iraq. The fact that Bush
junior is prepared to enlist the services of a man accused of war
crimes underlines the brazen cynicism employed by the American
government to justify its illegal war against an impoverished
country. Comment: I bet he feels right at home beside all
the other war criminals leading this war

George's little antics If you stayed up late enough to
watch the announcement of the start of the war in Iraq, you might
have caught a glimpse of something very unsettling. In an apparent
error, the BBC aired coverage of pre-speech preparations, live from
the satellite feed coming from the Oval Office.
The fact that the BBC has "profusely and repeatedly apologised" to
the White House and that the administration has removed control of
feeds from the networks and put it in their own hands as a result
of the blunder, should indicate the seriousness of what you were
not supposed to see. Ditto the absolute absence of any media
coverage of the incident.

The footage was the most
disturbing thing on television in some time. There was US President
George W Bush, being prepped for his televised declaration of war.
It was not the combing of his hair, the only aspect of the coverage
reported by any American media outlet (the Washington Post in this
case), which was cause for embarrassment; everyone expects that.
Rather, it was the demeanour — I would say antics — of
the president himself.Bush, the so-called leader
of the free world, was sitting behind his desk going over his
speech, as we would expect. But then it got weird. I felt like I
was looking behind the curtain, and it was uglier than I ever
imagined.

Like some class clown
trying to get attention from the back of the room, he started
mugging for his handlers. His eyes darted back and forth impishly
as he cracked faces at others around him. He pumped a fist and
self-consciously muttered, "feel good," which was interestingly
sanitised into the more mature and assertive, "I'm feeling good" by
the same Washington Post.

He was goofing around, and
there's only one way to interpret that kind of behaviour just
seconds before announcing war on Iraq: the man is an idiot.Most
Europeans and many others around the world have assumed this for
some time. To have it actually confirmed — beyond a
reasonable doubt — on live television, is perhaps a little
too harsh to reconcile with our wish to believe we live in a fair,
democratic world of which benevolent forces are mostly in charge. I
felt sick.

What Americans don't
understand is that Europeans have known this about Bush since he
was Governor of Texas. They've always known it, because it is so
absolutely obvious, that the man who dodged military service, who
laughs at death penalty pleas for mercy, who didn't know where Iraq
was two years ago, is less than a fit leader. And they cannot
understand how Americans have been led to the brink of disaster by
this talentless scion, this lackadaisical lily-dipper. This
idiot.

How can you have respect
for a nation that follows such a man? How can you sit by while he
and his cronies decimate the constitution, rape the economy,
declare real war on an enemy of dubious threat and declare
diplomatic war on your best friends? How do you let his
administration systematically disparage and even arrest any
dissenters, thereby ensuring they are forever marked for special
treatment by the machinations of “homeland
security?”

Yes, it's complicated.
You're at war, we know, even though this "war on terror" might have
been better handled as a special operation rather than a public
display of hysteria. Bush has supposedly intelligent people around
him to help make the tough decisions, even if they're always
attributed to him as if he were some sort of deity.

We are constantly told:
"The President will decide that at the appropriate time" or "The
President is very concerned about that". Yes, I'm sure he is. But
there was no escaping the fact that on Wednesday night, it was a
Yosemite Sam impersonator who declared war on a sovereign country
and who now calls the shots for all of us. Slate called him the
closest we've ever been to a world dictator in a long time,
probably since Caesar. Sometimes, maybe it really is better to pay
no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Wave of fury sweeps Middle East Fuelled by graphic
television pictures of wounded Iraqi civilians and text messages on
mobile phones, a tidal wave of fury against Britain and America is
sweeping the Arab world. In Jordan, traditionally the most moderate
and tolerant of Arab countries, people are leaving work early and
paying obsessive attention to al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite
channel. Its coverage of civilian casualties inflicted by the air
raids on Baghdad has struck a particular chord. Pictures shown on
Tuesday night of a wounded child have made an indelible
impact.

"The whole British and
American aggression against Iraq is evil, but the thing I can't get
out of my head is the picture of the little boy who died in
Baghdad," said Khalid Ramadan, 48, an engineer in the Jordanian
capital, Amman. "The picture of that child resembles the bloody
hands of Bush and Blair."Newspapers are echoing
these sentiments across the Arab world. The Algerian daily, el-Kha,
said young men were rushing to volunteer to defend Iraq. Beside a
front-page picture of Saddam Hussein, el-Kha carried the headline:
"The American and British forces become bogged down in
Iraq."

Technology has fuelled the
passage of emotive messages about Iraq's plight. In Jordan, text
messages are being constantly transmitted. In the space of
yesterday morning alone, one Jordanian journalist received three
messages. One sent under the name "Baghdad" read: "I don't ask you
for bread or guns. I only ask for your grief, because I am
burning."Another text message that
began on the mobile phones of Amman and is spreading throughout the
Arab world says: "They have hit us with missiles from Apaches.
Where are you, Arab masses? Will you help us?"

Countless expressions of
sympathy and anger are particularly significant in countries such
as Jordan and Saudi Arabia, whose governments are quietly
supporting the Anglo-American offensive. Nonetheless, several Saudi
newspapers gave front-page prominence yesterday to a photograph of
Iraqis jubilantly swarming over a downed Apache helicopter.Okaz,
a Saudi daily newspaper, said an attack on an Arab state by outside
powers was bound to engender Arab sympathy. "The firm position of
Saudi Arabia is to oppose the military aggression," the paper
claimed.

Al-Riyadh, which often
reflects Saudi government thinking, maintains that America's
overriding aim is to seize Iraq's oil. The paper carried a cartoon
of President George W Bush pouring blood and human limbs into a
barrel - with oil coming out of a tap. All these images have led
Arabs with no sympathy for Saddam to rally behind his regime. "I
acknowledge that Saddam is a dictator," said Hisham Bustani, a
27-year-old dentist in Amman. "But at the moment, I am with Saddam
against the imperialist aggression.

"You will not find a single
person here who feels differently. We are against the aggression
not out of any particular sympathy with the Iraqi regime but
because it violates the territory of the Arab nation and Islam."
One country is dramatically out of step with these sentiments.
Kuwait is the only Arab state to support the war publicly. Its
commentators plaintively accuse al-Jazeera and other satellite
channels of stirring up support for Saddam. In the pan-Arab
Ashsharq al-Awsat, Ahmad al-Rubai, a Kuwaiti MP, said Arab
television stations were unquestioningly repeating Iraqi
propaganda.Western journalists with
the coalition forces were reporting the facts as they saw them
"without any tone of heroics or even support for the allied
armies". Amid a sea of anger, Kuwait is a lonely
voice.

Film
exposing Pentagon war crimes premieres in US A powerful
film exposing the US role in the massacre of thousands of unarmed
prisoners of war in Afghanistan was shown for the first time in the
United States February 6.The US premiere of Afghan
Massacre—Convoy of Death was held at American University
before a largely student audience. Made by Irish documentary
filmmaker Jamie Doran, who was present for the premiere, Afghan
Massacre has already been broadcast on national television in
Britain, Germany, Australia and Italy, and rights to broadcast it
have been sold to networks in a total of 24 countries.

Afghan Massacre is now
available on video and can be purchased at the web site of
Doran’s film company, Atlantic Celtic Film
CorporationBrief video excerpts from
the film are posted on Oneworld
TV .After a rough cut of the film was screened before the
European Parliament last year, it became the subject of articles
and commentaries in virtually every major newspaper in Europe,
prompting demands by human rights organizations and lawyers for an
official investigation. In the US, however, the film has been
subjected to a near-total blackout by the media and unremitting
hostility from the Bush administration, which unsuccessfully
pressured the German government to stop its broadcast in that
country.

Official Washington’s
hostility is well founded. Doran’s film provides irrefutable
evidence that US forces in Afghanistan carried out a massive war
crime. Working as a reporter for Japanese television, Doran covered
the US-led siege of the Qala-i-Janghi fortress, where hundreds of
captured Taliban prisoners were killed. Footage from the fortress
included in the film presents the images sanitized out of US
coverage of the event: the broken corpses of young Afghans killed
by US air strikes and automatic weapons fire littering the grounds
of the fortress—many of them with their arms still tied
behind their backs.

The film reveals what took
place after this assault. As Doran notes, while the US and most of
the world media was focused on the death of a CIA agent and the
capture of the so-called “American Taliban,” John
Walker Lindh, who barely survived the Qala-i-Janghi massacre,
little attention was paid to the fate of the other prisoners. Some
8,000 Taliban fighters had given themselves up to General Abdul
Rashid Dostum’s Northern Alliance, which functioned as a
proxy army for the US during the Afghan invasion.

Some 3,000 of them were
crammed into private container trucks commandeered by
Doshtum’s forces. During a 20-hour drive to the Sheberghan
prison, most of these prisoners died from suffocation in the
airless containers. Witnesses interviewed in the film described how
soldiers fired into the containers when the prisoners screamed for
air and water. Others reported seeing blood dripping from the
trucks.

Several witnesses recounted
that US soldiers were present as the prisoners were loaded into the
trucks and also when the container doors were opened at Sheberghan
and hundreds of dead bodies spilled out. One soldier said that US
troops in charge of the operation told their Afghan allies to
“get rid of them [the bodies] before satellite pictures could
be taken.”

The final stage of this
grisly operation was the transport of the dead and wounded
prisoners to a barren stretch of desert 10 minutes up the road,
called Dasht-i-Leili, where the bodies were unloaded and several
hundred prisoners who were still alive were shot to death. Again,
witnesses said US Special Forces troops were present during these
executions and when bulldozers pushed the corpses into a mass
grave.

The film begins and ends
with the hideous scenes of this burial site, as well as a second
one nearby, where the ground is littered with human bones, bits of
clothing and shell casings. Doran has repeatedly demanded a speedy
investigation into the massacre and action by the United Nations to
protect the gravesites against an attempt to destroy the
evidence.

Human rights experts have
given great weight to the diversity of the witnesses interviewed in
the film, including soldiers, truck drivers and other civilians
representing a wide range of Afghanistan’s disparate ethnic
communities. Dostum’s forces, however, have already murdered
two of these witnesses, while others have been imprisoned and
tortured.

The Word Socialist Web Site
interviewed the film’s director, who came to the premiere in
Washington direct from Afghanistan, where he had attempted to gain
critical new material for a sequel to Afghan Massacre that he is
preparing.

Doran was to meet a courier
across Afghanistan’s northeast border to purchase a videotape
that includes footage of US troops at the scene of the mass
killings. Afghan journalist Najibullah Quraishi, who collaborated
with Doran on Afghan Massacre, was abducted and nearly beaten to
death in an earlier attempt to obtain the tape. The filmmaker
speculates that General Dostum is intent on keeping the tape as an
“insurance policy,” threatening to use it to expose the
US role in the killings if Washington and the regime it backs in
Kabul should attempt to deprive him of his power.

Doran said that the courier
was detained by Uzbek militiamen who had told people in the area
that they were searching for a man with a videotape. He has
reportedly been tortured.

“How many more people
will have to die before the government in this country admits what
happened?” asked Doran. He stressed that it is a priority to
protect the mass grave sites and establish a witness protection
program for those who have testified as eyewitnesses to the war
crimes. “If this country can propose to fly 500 Iraqi
scientists and their families to Cyprus, then presumably they could
bring 25 truck drivers out of Afghanistan,” he
said.

“As high as Rumsfeld’s office”Doran said that
the evidence he has gathered, and which he will use in his upcoming
sequel to Afghan Massacre, indicates that the responsibility for
the war crimes in Afghanistan goes “as high as [US Defense
Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld’s office.”

Within the US media,
government efforts to suppress Afghan Massacre have thus far
produced the desired results. Doran described the role of the
American media as “pretty tragic.” He added that one
American journalist who was following up the story recounted a
conversation with a senior State Department spokesman. Asked why
the story had yet to run in any major national daily, the spokesman
replied, “You have to understand, we are in touch with the
nationals on a daily basis. It just won’t run, even if
it’s true.”Comment:And Rumsfeld
has the gall to talk about the geneva convention...the man is
sick

Back at Home, Grieving -- and Some Questions Neither
Spc. Jamaal Addison nor Pfc. Howard Johnson II was a gung-ho
fighter, itching for battle in Iraq. Each had joined the Army for
job training and a better foothold for the future.Instead, the two members of
the 507th Maintenance Co. became early casualties of war after
their supply convoy was ambushed Sunday in the Iraqi city of
Nasiriyah.

Addison, 22, was the son of
a Georgia postal worker, and Johnson, 21, the son of an Alabama
minister. Their families officially learned of their deaths on
Tuesday, but their grief was compounded by guesswork and even
anger. They wanted to know so badly how their sons had died. "They
owe us some facts," said Kevin Addison, Jamaal Addison's father.
"We will never know the truth of why a maintenance crew could
wander so far out in the battlefield."At the brick home where
Addison grew up in this Atlanta suburb, neighbors and family
quietly visited this afternoon. There were no yellow ribbons or
U.S. flags. Just the sound of birds in the trees. Kevin Addison
stood alone near a rosebush. Glazed with grief and exhaustion, he
had driven nine hours to Florida and back to break the news to his
mother that her grandson -- the one she had knit booties for as a
baby and called "my heart" -- was dead. He grew angrier with every
mile. The feeling was echoed by Jamaal Addison's mother, Patricia
Roberts, who spent the afternoon making burial arrangements. "Bush
is sending other people's children to war," she said. "He is
telling people how honorably they might die. I would rather my son
be a coward and in my arms than Bush's hero." Comment: Welcome to
Bush's America.

Bush Says War to Last However Long It Takes Faced with
new fears the Iraq war could go on for months, President Bush said
on Thursday the conflict will last "however long it takes to win"
with the removal of Saddam Hussein as leader. Bush and British
Prime Minister Tony Blair concluded two days of talks at the
president's Camp David retreat with an appeal to the United Nations
to immediately resume the oil-for-food program in Iraq to address
urgent humanitarian needs triggered by the week-old war. "This is
urgent," said Blair at a joint news conference with
Bush.

The two staunch war allies
went into their meeting with their forces facing unexpectedly
strong resistance from the Iraqis, blinding sandstorms and the need
to protect a long and vulnerable supply line. Some military
officers are now talking about the conflict lasting months. Bush
shrugged off those issues, and made clear to the Iraqi people that
the United States is resolved to fight on no matter what. "It's a
matter of victory and the Iraqi people have got to know that, you
see. They have got to know that they will be liberated and Saddam
Hussein will be removed no matter how long it takes," Bush
said.

Iraqi rebels who rose up
against Saddam after the 1991 Gulf War complained the United States
left them too soon, only to be massacred by the Iraqi leader's
forces. Divided U.N. Security Council members have been haggling
over restarting the U.N. oil-for-food program for Iraq, with the
politics of war stalling agreement on a resolution."This
urgent humanitarian issue must not be politicized. The Security
Council should give Secretary-General Kofi Annan the authority to
start getting food supplies to those most in need of assistance,"
Bush said.The program uses Iraqi oil
revenues to pay for food, medicine and other civilian goods to ease
the impact of sanctions imposed in August 1990 following Iraq's
invasion of Kuwait.

In a joint news conference,
the two leaders also promised a U.N. role in post-war Iraq's
reconstruction but were vague on the details. And they repeated
that Bush would unveil details of a Middle East peace plan aimed at
creating a Palestinian state once the Palestinians' new prime
minister forms a government. Blair charged some captured British
soldiers were executed by the Iraqis. He said photographs had been
released of those executed. "If anyone needed any further evidence
of the depravity of Saddam's regime, this atrocity provides it,"
Blair said. Comment:What kind of drugs, I wonder, is Blair on. What a
ridiculous comment to make, he and Bush invade a soverign country,
drop thousands of tons of bombs and missiles on that country,
killing thousands of the soldiers defending the country and, so
far, hundreds of innocent civilians, and then he complains that two
British soldiers get executed. Were the 26 men women and children
shopping in a Baghdad market yesterday not executed? At least the
British soldiers were dispatched with a bullet, what of the woman
and her three children burned alive in their car as others looked
on in horror, unable to help them, were they not executed in a much
more horrible henious and callous way? If anyone needed any further
evidence of the depravity of Blair and Bush then these
pictures provide it.

US ambassador walks out of UN Iraq debate US ambassador
John Negroponte walked out of a UN Security Council debate today
after his Iraqi counterpart accused Washington of trying to
exterminate Iraqi people.“I did sit through
quite a long part of what he had to say but I’d heard
enough,” he said.Iraq’s envoy Mohammed
Al-Douri accused the United States of arranging contracts to
rebuild Iraq in 1997, six years before the war began last
week.Negroponte got up and
walked out as Al-Douri continued to speak, accusing the United
States of a military campaign to wipe out the Iraqi
people.

Al-Douri said the United
States had even planned the carving up of Iraq before Iraq invaded
Kuwait in 1990. Almost spluttering, he said that the United States
was now using the humanitarian issue to hide its “criminal
aggression.” The Iraqi envoy urged the Security Council to
halt the war in Iraq, saying ending the conflict was even more
important than getting humanitarian assistance into the region.
Al-Douri was the last of more than 80 speakers at the first open
Security Council debate on Iraq since the war began last week.
About a dozen countries that are not on the council supported the
US position, but the vast majority opposed the war and expressed
regret that Iraq’s disarmament could not be achieved
peacefully.

“Britain and the
United States are about to start a real war of extermination that
will kill everything and destroy everything,” Al-Douri
warned. “And then their regret will be of no use.”
“If the humanitarian issue is very important, it is more
important” to halt the war, he said. “The warning I
would like to make to the members of the august council is that the
United States and the British were hoodwinked when they were told
that the Iraqi people would receive them with flowers and hugs and
ululations, and the children and the mothers will rejoice at the
coming of the US forces,” he said. It was at that point that
Negroponte got up from his seat around the horseshoe-shaped table
in the Security Council chamber and walked out. Al-Douri went on to
say that “the Iraqi army up until now has not confronted the
United States forces – just “the Iraqi people, the
women, the children, the peasants.” Comment: Negroponte simply could not take the heat
from having to listen to the truth.

Meteor Chunks Damage Homes, Light Up Night Sky PARK
FOREST, Ill. -- A freelance photographer shooting a fire in south
suburban Park Forest captured a bright flash of light that "turned
midnight to noon" for several seconds, and police said it appeared
it was the breaking up of a meteorite. Huge chunks of rock-like
objects (pictured, left ) from the suspected meteorite damaged the
roofs of two homes, but nobody was injured. Park Forest Police
Captain Francis DioGuardi said a large chunk also landed on a
residential street and broke apart, slightly damaging the siding of
another home. People in several states throughout the Midwest
reported seeing a bright flash of light in the sky last night. The
lights were seen in Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio. The
National Weather Service agreed that the flash of light was caused
by either a meteorite or piece of space debris.

Who are the
real, useful idiots? So the Lenins of the world think the
anti-war protestors are nothing more than unpatriotic, ill-informed
stooges of brutal dictators everywhere. Useful idiot is the term
commonly used by right wing ideologues to describe the naïve
peaceniks that are supposedly giving aid and comfort to Saddam
Hussein by opposing the impending invasion of Iraq. Instead of
characterizing the marchers as ordinary, loyal Americans who
decided to get off their duffs for once and speak out against what
they see as an unprovoked invasion of a weak country, the marchers
are made out to be blame-America-first communists under the
organizational leadership of Iraqi spies.

Well, I have a different
take on the subject.

I would say that people who
hold up the First Amendment as an example of America's greatness
but then disparage those who exercise that right to peaceably
assemble are the real, useful idiots. Those cynics cherish freedom
and democracy as abstract principles but
loathe those same ideals when they are put into practice in support
of a cause with which they disagree. They see the mass
demonstrations of democracy as a threat to the country, not as a
show of its strength.

They are the useful idiots
of John Ashcroft. The right to an attorney, habeas corpus (probable
cause) and the presumption of innocence-- all cornerstones of our
American democracy-- are under attack by an Attorney General who
believes constitutionally guaranteed rights can be denied,
depending on the crime. Now, the mouthpieces of the far right are
concocting hypothetical "ticking bomb" scenarios to scare Americans
into believing that we need to take another look at torture as an
interrogation method.

Ben Franklin's words of
wisdom should be required reading for these fascists in red, white
and blue clothing. He got it right when he said that, "They that
can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety
deserve neither liberty nor safety." The neo-conservatives in
charge of our government talk about sparking a democratic
revolution in the Middle East, but by their arm-twisting and
pay-offs to foreign governments they are circumventing the will
of the people in those countries-- who are overwhelmingly against
the war.

Democracy abroad is a grand
concept to this group of useful idiots, except when it expresses
itself in the form of a Turkish parliamentary vote prohibiting US
troops from deploying there. They are even more infuriated when
democratic principles manifest in the form of the German electorate
voting an anti-war Chancellor into office or the French Prime
Minister actually listening to his people.

These useful idiots
wouldn't recognize true democracy if it marched past their front
door on the way to the voting booth, but, oh, how they love the
symbols of democracy. They even want to put you in jail for
disrespecting the flag. What they don't understand is that by
abridging your freedom of speech-- even the unpatriotic and
offensive act of burning the flag in protest-- they are setting
fire to the Bill of Rights. They apparently forgot that the flag is
just a piece of cloth if it has no democratic ideals to
represent.

If it sounds like I take
these attacks personally, that's because I do. I went to my first
anti-war protest last month (actually it was my first time at any
kind of protest). When I was walking through the streets of
downtown Dallas with thousands (and there were thousands) of fellow
Dallasites, Texans, Americans, it was one of the proudest moments
of my life. And no amount of brow-beating and comparisons to
Lenin's unwitting dupes will change that.

No, the protesters aren't
unpatriotic, un-American or useful idiots, but people who criticize
them for practicing democracy in its purest fform have a few things
to learn about citizenship in a democratic republic. It is not
merely your right to dissent when you disagree with your
government's policies, IT IS YOUR CIVIC OBLIGATION. Before the Bush
hawks start exporting democracy to the Middle East through the use
of military force, maybe we should make sure we've got it right in
America.

Go home and leave us alone! It is now five days since
the British and US governments launched an unprecedented military
invasion of my country of birth, its people, land, towns and
cities. This attack was launched without UN authority, public
support or the will of the international community. To win support
for this unjust and illegal campaign, it has been claimed that this
is not a colonial war of occupation but a war of liberation; a
compassionate war. Britain and the US will save the Iraqis by
bombing so they can thrive in a democratic Iraq and live at ease
with their neighbours. Those who believed the hype expected the
Iraqis to welcome the invading armies. After British troops were
forced to retreat from Basra yesterday, a military spokesman said:
"We were expecting a lot of hands up, but it hasn't quite worked
out that way."

It is now clear to everyone
that ordinary Iraqis are resisting this military aggression with
their lives and souls. Commentators and politicians in Britain and
America seem taken aback: how come the Iraqis are putting up such a
fight? Why do they so passionately resist this attempt to liberate
them from the brutal dictator, Saddam? But Iraqis aren't surprised
at all.

When Iraq was first
colonised by Britain in 1917, Iraqis were fed the same British
propaganda about liberation through occupation. We fought the best
part of last century to get rid of colonial Britain and, since
then, have helped a great number of independence movements
worldwide. Iraqis may wish for the current regime to change, but
anyone who understands our culture will know that in this war
Iraqis will fight and die, not to save President Saddam Hussein,
but to protect their home, land, dignity and self-respect from a
new world order alien to their way of life. We are an enormously
proud people.

And so history repeats
itself. Just as in the past century, the military superiority of
the Anglo-American invaders may eventually overwhelm the Iraqi
army, which is weak and ill-equipped because of sanctions,
containment and isolation. But there is also no doubt that in the
end this military crusade against Iraq will fail just like the
previous British occupation of Iraq, led by General Maude, where
the military odds were just as much in favour of the British army.
Iraqis - in particular the Arab-Iraqi Shi'ites - fought bitter and
hard and suffered thousands of casualties in order to liberate Iraq
from the British occupation. They will do so again.

It is true that, this time,
the British and US forces may assume control of sea, air and
deserts of Iraq, but they will never win the war for the hearts and
minds of the Iraqi people. Not only do the people of Iraq face
devastation by the US and UK aggression on a scale not previously
known to mankind, but they also face death and destruction by
another war - the civil war that would inevitably follow. We know
what this means, because we have been there before. As a young lad
in the town of Mosul I lived through the horror of the civil war in
Iraq in 1959-60, when the communist and Kurdish coalition fought
the nationalists for control of the country. With my brothers and
parents, we used to hide huddled together, in a small concealed
basement for days on end, absolutely terrified of being slaughtered
because we were considered to be on the Nationalist
side.

I saw Iraqis split in half,
while alive, by two cars. Girls were hanged from telegraph posts,
with fish hooks through their breasts. Men were hanged outside my
school gates. We were forced to watch mass hangings in public
squares. Dead bodies with their throats slit lay in the streets.
Forty years on, in the comfort and safety of London, those images
remain vivid. A scar of fear for life, and one shared by a great
many of my people.This is the fate that
awaits "liberated" Iraq. Only today, the Kurds - backed by the US -
have even more violent scores to settle. There are many, many
people in Iraq today who fear the sectarian violence that may
result from the breakdown of the secular regime; and Iraqi history
shows that they are right to fear it. I do not wish this future to
await anybody in the world, friend or foe.

Neither the British nor the
American forces will be able to react quickly enough in order to
prevent the slaughter of innocent civilians in the ensuing civil
war. In the aftermath there will not be an Iraq to re-build, but
simply chaos. So the message from Iraq is clear: go home and leave
us alone. You will never be welcome in Iraq as colonisers. Stop
destroying Iraq. Do not bury our nation. Stop the war and give
peace and the UN inspectors a chance in the name of
humanity.

LOOK INWARD,
AMERICAIt has become painfully
obvious that America faces a threat from within. The threat comes
not just from terrorists who have managed to penetrate America's
porous borders - the 9/11 terrorists, for example - though that
danger is real enough. It also comes from disgruntled Americans -
converts to militarized Islam or to radical anti-Americanism. In a
sense, these folks are more dangerous, because they often enjoy
full rights as U.S. citizens: Not only do our laws protect them,
but so does our culture. Comment:
There's that term "disgruntled americans" again. How many of you
would say you are "disgruntled" in some way with the government?
Well don't say it too loud, you might find yourself literally bound
and gagged. Welcome to the true face of America, "the land of
free", just so long as you sit down and shut
up!

Bush and Rumsfeld Had
Better Watch Their BackGeorge Monbiot, The
Guardian LONDON, 27 March 2003 — Suddenly, the government of
the United States has discovered the virtues of international law.
It may be waging an illegal war against a sovereign state; it may
be seeking to destroy every treaty which impedes its attempts to
run the world, but when five of its captured soldiers were paraded
in front of the Iraqi television cameras on Sunday, Donald
Rumsfeld, the US defense secretary, immediately complained that
“it is against the Geneva Convention to show photographs of
prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for
them”.

He is, of course, quite
right. Article 13 of the third convention, concerning the treatment
of prisoners, insists that they “must at all times be
protected ... against insults and public curiosity”. This may
number among the less heinous of the possible infringements of the
laws of war, but the conventions, ratified by Iraq in 1956, are
non-negotiable. If you break them, you should expect to be
prosecuted for war crimes.This being so, Rumsfeld had
better watch his back. For this enthusiastic convert to the cause
of legal warfare is, as head of the Defense Department, responsible
for a series of crimes sufficient, were he ever to be tried, to put
him away for the rest of his natural life.

His prison camp in
Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba, where 641 men (nine of whom are British
citizens) are held, breaches no fewer than 15 articles of the third
convention. The US government broke the first of these (Article 13)
as soon as the prisoners arrived, by displaying them, just as the
Iraqis have done, on television. In this case, however, they were
not encouraged to address the cameras. They were kneeling on the
ground, hands tied behind their backs, wearing blacked-out goggles
and earphones. In breach of Article 18, they had been stripped of
their own clothes and deprived of their possessions. They were then
interned in a penitentiary (against Article 22), where they were
denied proper mess facilities (26), canteens (28), religious
premises (34), opportunities for physical exercise (38), access to
the text of the convention (41), freedom to write to their families
(70 and 71) and parcels of food and books (72).

They were not
“released and repatriated without delay after the cessation
of active hostilities” (118), because, the US authorities
say, their interrogation might, one day, reveal interesting
information about Al-Qaeda. Article 17 rules that captives are
obliged to give only their name, rank, number and date of birth. No
“coercion may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from
them information of any kind whatever”. In the hope of
breaking them, however, the authorities have confined them to
solitary cells and subjected them to what is now known as
“torture lite”: Sleep deprivation and constant exposure
to bright light. Unsurprisingly, several of the prisoners have
sought to kill themselves, by smashing their heads against the
walls or trying to slash their wrists with plastic
cutlery.

The US government claims
that these men are not subject to the Geneva conventions, as they
are not “prisoners of war”, but “unlawful
combatants”. The same claim could be made, with rather more
justice, by the Iraqis holding the US soldiers who illegally
invaded their country. But this redefinition is itself a breach of
Article 4 of the third convention, under which people detained as
suspected members of a militia (the Taleban) or a volunteer corps
(Al-Qaeda) must be regarded as prisoners of war.

Even if there is doubt
about how such people should be classified, Article 5 insists that
they “shall enjoy the protection of the present convention
until such time as their status has been determined by a competent
tribunal.But when, earlier this
month, lawyers representing 16 of them demanded a court hearing,
the US court of appeals ruled that as Guantanamo Bay is not
sovereign US territory, the men have no constitutional rights. Many
of these prisoners appear to have been working in Afghanistan as
teachers, engineers or aid workers. If the US government either
tried or released them, its embarrassing lack of evidence would be
brought to light.

You would hesitate to
describe these prisoners as lucky, unless you knew what had
happened to some of the other men captured by the Americans and
their allies in Afghanistan. On Nov. 21, 2001, around 8,000 Taleban
soldiers and Pashtun civilians surrendered at Konduz to the
Northern Alliance commander, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum. Many of them
have never been seen again.

As Jamie Doran’s film
Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death records, some hundreds, possibly
thousands, of them were loaded into container lorries at
Qala-i-Zeini, near the town of Mazar-i-Sharif, on Nov. 26 and 27.
The doors were sealed and the lorries were left to stand in the sun
for several days. At length, they departed for Sheberghan prison,
80 miles away. The prisoners, many of whom were dying of thirst and
asphyxiation, started banging on the sides of the trucks.
Dostum’s men stopped the convoy and machine-gunned the
containers. When they arrived at Sheberghan, most of the captives
were dead.

The US special forces
running the prison watched the bodies being unloaded. They
instructed Dostum’s men to “get rid of them before
satellite pictures can be taken”. Doran interviewed a
Northern Alliance soldier guarding the prison. “I was a
witness when an American soldier broke one prisoner’s neck.
The Americans did whatever they wanted. We had no power to stop
them.” Another soldier alleged: “They took the
prisoners outside and beat them up, and then returned them to the
prison. But sometimes they were never returned, and they
disappeared.”

Many of the survivors were
loaded back in the containers with the corpses, then driven to a
place in the desert called Dasht-i-Leili. In the presence of up to
40 US special forces, the living and the dead were dumped into
ditches. Anyone who moved was shot. The German newspaper Die Zeit
investigated the claims and concluded that: “No one doubted
that the Americans had taken part. Even at higher levels there are
no doubts on this issue.” The US group Physicians for Human
Rights visited the places identified by Doran’s witnesses and
found they “all ... contained human remains consistent with
their designation as possible grave sites”.

It should not be necessary
to point out that hospitality of this kind also contravenes the
third Geneva Convention, which prohibits “violence to life
and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel
treatment and torture”, as well as extra-judicial execution.
Donald Rumsfeld’s department, assisted by a pliant media, has
done all it can to suppress Jamie Doran’s film, while Gen.
Dostum has begun to assassinate his witnesses.

It is not hard, therefore,
to see why the US government fought first to prevent the
establishment of the international criminal court, and then to
ensure that its own citizens are not subject to its jurisdiction.
The five soldiers dragged in front of the cameras on Monday should
thank their lucky stars that they are prisoners not of the American
forces fighting for civilization, but of the “barbaric and
inhuman” Iraqis.

Robert Fisk: 'It was an outrage, an obscenity'
It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal
door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains
inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi
mother and her three small children in their still-smouldering
car.

Two missiles from an
American jet killed them all – by my estimate, more than 20
Iraqi civilians, torn to pieces before they could be 'liberated' by
the nation that destroyed their lives. Who dares, I ask myself, to
call this 'collateral damage'? Abu Taleb Street was packed with
pedestrians and motorists when the American pilot approached
through the dense sandstorm that covered northern Baghdad in a
cloak of red and yellow dust and rain yesterday morning.

It's a dirt-poor
neighbourhood, of mostly Shia Muslims, the same people whom Messrs
Bush and Blair still fondly hope will rise up against President
Saddam Hussein, a place of oil-sodden car-repair shops, overcrowded
apartments and cheap cafés. Everyone I spoke to heard the
plane. One man, so shocked by the headless corpses he had just
seen, could say only two words. "Roar, flash," he kept saying and
then closed his eyes so tight that the muscles rippled between
them.

How should one record so
terrible an event? Perhaps a medical report would be more
appropriate. But the final death toll is expected to be near to 30
and Iraqis are now witnessing these awful things each day; so there
is no reason why the truth, all the truth, of what they see should
not be told.

For another question
occurred to me as I walked through this place of massacre
yesterday. If this is what we are seeing in Baghdad, what is
happening in Basra and Nasiriyah and Kerbala? How many civilians
are dying there too, anonymously, indeed unrecorded, because there
are no reporters to be witness to their suffering?

Abu Hassan and Malek
Hammoud were preparing lunch for customers at the Nasser restaurant
on the north side of Abu Taleb Street. The missile that killed them
landed next to the westbound carriageway, its blast tearing away
the front of the café and cutting the two men – the
first 48, the second only 18 – to pieces. A fellow worker led
me through the rubble. "This is all that is left of them now," he
said, holding out before me an oven pan dripping with
blood.

At least 15 cars burst into
flames, burning many of their occupants to death. Several men tore
desperately at the doors of another flame-shrouded car in the
centre of the street that had been flipped upside down by the same
missile. They were forced to watch helplessly as the woman and her
three children inside were cremated alive in front of them. The
second missile hit neatly on the eastbound carriageway, sending
shards of metal into three men standing outside a concrete
apartment block with the words, "This is God's possession" written
in marble on the outside wall.

The building's manager,
Hishem Danoon, ran to the doorway as soon as he heard the massive
explosion. "I found Ta'ar in pieces over there," he told me. His
head was blown off. "That's his hand." A group of young men and a
woman took me into the street and there, a scene from any horror
film, was Ta'ar's hand, cut off at the wrist, his four fingers and
thumb grasping a piece of iron roofing. His young colleague,
Sermed, died the same instant. His brains lay piled a few feet
away, a pale red and grey mess behind a burnt car. Both men worked
for Danoon. So did a doorman who was also killed.

As each survivor talked,
the dead regained their identities. There was the electrical
shop-owner killed behind his counter by the same missile that cut
down Ta'ar and Sermed and the doorman, and the young girl standing
on the central reservation, trying to cross the road, and the truck
driver who was only feet from the point of impact and the beggar
who regularly called to see Mr Danoon for bread and who was just
leaving when the missiles came screaming through the sandstorm to
destroy him.

In Qatar, the
Anglo-American forces – let's forget this nonsense about
"coalition" – announced an inquiry. The Iraqi government, who
are the only ones to benefit from the propaganda value of such a
bloodbath, naturally denounced the slaughter, which they initially
put at 14 dead. So what was the real target? Some Iraqis said there
was a military encampment less than a mile from the street, though
I couldn't find it. Others talked about a local fire brigade
headquarters, but the fire brigade can hardly be described as a
military target.

Certainly, there had been
an attack less than an hour earlier on a military camp further
north. I was driving past the base when two rockets exploded and I
saw Iraqi soldiers running for their lives out of the gates and
along the side of the highway. Then I heard two more explosions;
these were the missiles that hit Abu Taleb Street.

Of course, the pilot who
killed the innocent yesterday could not see his victims. Pilots
fire through computer-aligned co-ordinates, and the sandstorm would
have hidden the street from his vision. But when one of Malek
Hammoud's friends asked me how the Americans could so blithely kill
those they claimed to want to liberate, he didn't want to learn
about the science of avionics or weapons delivery
systems.

And why should he? For this
is happening almost every day in Baghdad. Three days ago, an entire
family of nine was wiped out in their home near the centre of the
city. A busload of civilian passengers were reportedly killed on a
road south of Baghdad two days ago. Only yesterday were Iraqis
learning the identity of five civilian passengers slaughtered on a
Syrian bus that was attacked by American aircraft close to the
Iraqi border at the weekend. The truth is that nowhere is safe in
Baghdad, and as the Americans and British close their siege in the
next few days or hours, that simple message will become ever more
real and ever more bloody.

We may put on the hairshirt
of morality in explaining why these people should die. They died
because of 11 September, we may say, because of President Saddam's
"weapons of mass destruction", because of human rights abuses,
because of our desperate desire to "liberate" them all. Let us not
confuse the issue with oil. Either way, I'll bet we are told
President Saddam is ultimately responsible for their deaths. We
shan't mention the pilot, of course.

Jubilation turns to hate as aid arrives The young man
wearing the brown shawl summed it up succinctly: "We want you to go
back home. We do not want your American and British aid," he said,
his eyes flashing with anger. If the British humanitarian taskforce
had any doubts as to the legitimacy of his claims, the sudden burst
of gunfire from a nearby building left no one in any
doubt.

The first attempt to
deliver aid to the Iraqi people was, in all respects, a practical
and logistical disaster. A convoy of vehicles, including two water
tankers and as many Warrior armoured vehicles, had set off from the
abandoned Shaiba airfield earlier. The intent was to deliver food
and water to win over the hearts and minds of the beleaguered
Iraqis.

As the convoy pulled up
inside the town, however, a crowd of predominantly young men ran
towards it. Fights and skirmishes broke out for bottles of water.
Iraqis asked for food and cigarettes. And while a cordon was
quickly created, hundreds rushed towards the trucks, overpowering
the soldiers. "We have had no water and no food," said Ali
Abdullah, 50. He stood away from the crowd, stroking his beard and
surveyed the scene intently as crowds of young men fought over the
water. "For five days now, we have been without electricity. Have
you brought some electricity?"

The exercise had been beset
with a number of difficulties from the outset. On leaving the
nearby Shaiba airfield - a series of abandoned hangars, runways and
outbuildings on the road to Basra - there had been innumerable
delays as reports of violence filtered back from Zubayr. Earlier,
there had been a delay in confirming security in the town. Inside
Zubayr, however, the distribution initially began with good nature.
Young men joked with each other, smiled and passed around bottles
of water. Within 10 minutes, however, an undercurrent of resentment
flowed to the surface. The war, the bombing, sanctions and their
cumulative toll all boiled over.

Jalil Ali, 25, the young
Iraqi in the brown shawl, asked if any of the humanitarian aid was
being provided by Americans. "Take it back," he yelled, pretending
to push it away. "We want the Americans to go back home. We do not
need them here. Go back home. I do not need this." Around him, his
friends giggled. Not far away, people rushed out of earthen
buildings and raced down a dual carriageway. Ali, however, seemed
to realise the irony only too well. "They bomb. And now they want
to give water and food. How can they do both? How?" It was then
that the gunfire erupted.Earlier, the soldiers had
been optimistic but pensive. After enduring a rainy and windy night
in the disused hangar at the Shaiba airfield, the convoy had been
well intentioned. It was a curious sight: a line of trucks bearing
much-needed humani tarian aid - aid that betrayed all the hallmarks
of an occupying force, but aid none the less. The Iraqis, while
initially jubilant, were quickly sceptical.

"I need electricity," said
Moyed Abdullah, 33. "I need to power my house. See the electricity
lines? They are not working; they have not been working for days.
Do you bring any electricity?" Around him, British and US soldiers
struggled to control the crowds. Time and again, the Iraqis were
pushed back - always, they seemed to slip in under the makeshift
rope-line. After a while, it seemed, it was better simply to stand
back and wait for the inevitable to happen.The burst of gunfire
from across the road finally stopped all attempts to supply the
aid. As soldiers leapt into the jeeps, a Warrior turned round and
took out the position the gunfire had come from. And with daylight
fast fading, the humanitarian taskforce decided to speed back to
its base at Shaibah airfield. Tomorrow, they will undoubtedly try
again to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi civilians. And
presumably tomorrow, they will encounter yet more
resentment.